Midterm

Question 1

What is SWE?

Answer 1

An engineering discipline concerned with all aspects of SW production

Question 2

What is the difference between SWE and CS?

Answer 2

CS focuses on theory and fundamentals; SWE is concerned with the practicalities of developing and delivering useful SW

Question 3

What are the fundamental SWE activities?

Answer 3

specification, development, validation, and evolution

Question 4

What are the key challenges facing SWE?

Answer 4

coping with increasing diversity, demands for reduced delivery times, and developing trustworthy software

Question 5

What are the costs of SWE?

Answer 5

Roughly 60% developmental and 40% testing; for custom SW, evolution costs often exceed development

Question 6

What are the types of SW products?

Answer 6

generic & customized products

Question 7

What are the attributes of good SW?

Answer 7

maintainability, dependability and security, efficiency, and acceptability

Question 8

What types of SW applications are there?

Answer 8

stand-alone, interactive transaction-based, embedded control systems, batch processing systems, entertainment (media) systems, systems for model and simulation, data collection systems, systems of systems

Question 9

What are the eight principles of the ACM/IEEE Code of Ethics?

Answer 9

public, client & employer, product, judgement, management, profession, colleagues, and self

Question 10

What are the biggest reasons that SW fails?

Answer 10

COME BACK

Question 11

What is the difference between plan-driven and agile processes?

Answer 11

In plan-driven, activities are planned for progress to be measured against. In agile, there is incremental planning. In practice, the process is a mix of both.

Question 12

What are the types of SW process models?

Answer 12

The Waterfall Method, Incremental Development, and Integration & Configuration

Question 13

What is the Waterfall method and what is it good for?

Answer 13

a plan-driven process with distinct phases that you cannot go back to; best for large system engineering projects with stable requirements

Question 14

What is incremental development?

Answer 14

A process where specification, development, and validation are interleaved (could be plan-driven or agile)

Question 15

What are the pros and cons of incremental development?

Answer 15

there’s a reduced cost of accommodating changing customer reqs, its easier to get customer feedback, and quicker delivery/deployment of usable SW for the customer; the process isn’t visible and system structure tends to degrade with incremental changes

Question 16

What is integration & configuration?

Answer 16

Making SW from already existing components for reduced costs & risks and faster delivery/deployment, but requirements compromises may not meet real needs of users and there’s loss of control over evolution or reused components

Question 17

How do you reduce the cost of rework?

Answer 17

Anticipate (activities allows for change to happen like prototyping) and Tolerance (allow for change at a low cost)

Question 18

How do you cope with change?

Answer 18

System prototyping and Incremental delivery?

Question 19

What are the approaches to SW improvement?

Answer 19

Maturity approach (improving process and project management by using better SWE practices) and Agile approach (iterative changes)

Question 20

What are the levels in the SEI Maturity Model?

Answer 20

Initial, Repeatable, Defined, Managed, Optimizing

Question 21

What are the activities in process improvement?

Answer 21

Measurement, Analysis, Change

Question 22

What are the process metrics for measurement?

Answer 22

time taken to complete tasks, resources needed to complete tasks, or number of occurrences of an event (like defects)

Question 23

What are the values of agile?

Answer 23

Individuals and Interactions over process and tools, Working Software over comprehensive documentation, Customer Collaboration over contract negotiation, Responding to Change over following a plan

Question 24

What are the parts of Scrum?

Answer 24

Development team, product backlog, scrum meeting, scrum master, sprint (usually 2-4 weeks), velocity

Question 25

What is the difference between scaling up and scaling out?

Answer 25

up is using agile methods for developing large SWS that can't be developed by a small team; out is introducing agile methods across a large organization with many years of SWD experience

Question 26

What do agile methods work best for?

Answer 26

new SWD rather than SW; its difficult for large systems

Question 27

What are agile maintenance problems?

Answer 27

lack of product documentation, keeping customers involved with the process, and maintaining the continuity of the development team

Question 28

What is requirements engineering?

Answer 28

the iterative process of establishing what the customer needs from the SW and what the constraints are (includes elicitation, specification, and validation)

Question 29

What is RE validation?

Answer 29

checking for validity, consistency, completeness, realism, and verifiability; methods include requirement reviews prototyping, and test-case generation

Question 30

What is RE elicitation?

Answer 30

iterative spiral of discovery, classification & organization, prioritization & negotiation, documentation/specification

Question 31

What are the techniques for elicitation?

Answer 31

interview, ethnography, and stories & scenarios (use cases)

Question 32

What is the difference between open and closed interviews?

Answer 32

open means various issues are explored and closed means there's a predetermined list of questions (most interviews are a mix of both)

Question 33

what is the difference between functional and non-functional requirements?

Answer 33

functional is statements of the service that the system must provide descriptions of how some computations must be carried out; non-functional constrain the system being developed and the dev process.

Question 34

What are the components of functional requirements?

Answer 34

user requirements (definitions) and developer requirements (specification)

Question 35

What metrics are used for non-functional requirements?

Answer 35

Speed, size, ease of use, reliability, robustness, portability

Question 36

What is requirements management?

Answer 36

managing and controlling changes to the system requirements created by business, organizational, and technical changes

Question 37

What is ethnography?

Answer 37

where social scientists spend time observing and analyzing how people work to develop requirements

Question 38

What should use cases include?

Answer 38

descriptions of the starting situation, the normal flow of events, what can go wrong, info on the other concurrent activities, and a description of what happens when the scenario finishes

Question 39

What do context models show?

Answer 39

how a system that is being modeled is positioned in an environment with other systems and process

Question 40

What do use case and sequence diagrams show?

Answer 40

interactions between users and systems in the system being designed

Question 41

What is the difference between use case and sequence diagrams?

Answer 41

use case diagrams describe interactions between a system and external actors while sequence diagrams add more info by showing interactions between system objects

Question 42

What do structural models show?

Answer 42

the organization and architecture of a system (like class diagrams showing the static structure of classes in a system and their associations)

Question 43

What do behavioral models show?

Answer 43

the dynamic behavior of an executing system (from the perspective of the data process by the system or the events that stimulate responses from it)

Question 44

What do activity diagrams show?

Answer 44

the processing of data where each activity represents one process step

Question 45

What do state diagrams show?

Answer 45

a system's behavior in response to internal or external events

Question 46

What are the system perspectives?

Answer 46

External (Context, Process/Activity), Interaction (Use-Case, Sequence), Structural (Class Generalization, Aggregation), Behavioral (Data-driven, Event-driven, State)

Question 47

What is model-driven engineering?

Answer 47

A SWD approach where models are the principle outputs of the dev process instead of programs (which are generated automatically from the models)

Question 48

What are the pros and cons of model-driven engineering?

Answer 48

this allows for higher levels of abstraction and cheaper adaption of systems to new platforms, but models may not be right for implementations and resources may have to go towards developing translators for new platforms