COMP 410 Study Exam Questions and Answers 2024

Unit 1 - In what year was the term software engineering coined by a NATO study group? - 1967 Why is so much of today's software not considered to have been engineered? - What is the life cycle of software engineering? - A life-cycle model is a description of the steps that should be performed when building a software product. What is the relationship between computer science and software engineering? - Name some of the problems resulting from team programming. - Interfacing problems (communication between code components) Unless the team is properly organized, much time can be wasted in conferences between team members. Why is there no planning phase, testing phase, and documentation phase during software development? - Planning: Until it is known exactly what is to be developed, there is no accurate, detailed plan that can be drawn up. Planning is carried out all throughout the software development lifecycle. Testing: If testing is treated as a separate (testing) phase, there is a very real danger that testing will not be carried out constantly throughout every phase of the product development and maintenance process. Documentation: we must always ensure the documentation of a software product must be complete, correct, and up to date. 1. Large turnover rate in the software industry. 2. It is almost impossible to perform the steps of a specific phase unless the documentation of the previous phase is complete, correct, and up to date. 3. It is virtually impossible to test whether a software product is working correctly unless documents are available to state how that software product is supposed to behave. 4. Maintenance is almost impossible unless there is a complete and correct set of documentation that describes precisely what the current version of the product does. What are the advantages of the object-oriented paradigm? - It is an integrated approach which is far smoother to transfer from workflow to workflow unlike the classical approach. This reduces the number of faults introduced during development. What are the major differences between the structured paradigm and the object-oriented paradigm? - - Information Hiding with Object Oriented - Post delivery maintenance easier with OO - Development is easier with OO Software - the machine-readable code, the specification document, the design document, legal and accounting documents of all kinds, the software project management plan, and other management documents as well as all types of manuals. Program - an autonomous piece of code, generally in the form of a deck of punched cards that could be executed. System - a system was a related collection of programs. Product - a nontrivial piece of software. Software Production - the way we produce software, and the end process is termed a product. Methodology - a way of developing a software product. Paradigm - a style of software development. Bug - a euphemism for a fault. When a programmer makes a mistake, the consequence of that mistake is a fault in the code. Error - the amount by which a result is incorrect. Attribute - a data component of an object. Method - the implementation of the operations of an object. Articulate the importance of adhering to a code of ethics. - If we do not have a code of ethics in which we adhere to, we may build and deploy software which is unethical. By having a collection of rules, we can determine if the software we are making is beneficial to its users. Unit 2 - Software Life-Cycle Models - Describe the evolution-tree life-cycle model. - The evolution-tree life-cycle model shows what steps of the lifecycle had to be reanalyzed during each episode (time period). Discuss the negative impact of change on software products. - It can produce issues such as the moving target problem, feature creep and regression faults. These can increase the costs as well as the time it takes to develop the software. Explain the impact of Miller's law on software production. - Miller's law states that at any one time, we humans are capable of concentrating on only approximately seven chunks (units of information). However, a typical software artifact has far more than seven chunks. To handle this, we can use stepwise refinement. This means we concentrate on the aspects that are currently the most important and postpone until later those aspects that are currently less critical. Describe the strengths of the iterative and incremental life-cycle model. - Multiple opportunities are offered for checking that the software product is correct.