Software Engineering MCQ Series 3, Software Engineering Quiz Series 3

The steps of an effective measurement process formulation, collection, analysis, interpretation and feedback.

To develop an effective use case, the main component is actors. The actors are people or computer systems.

It is difficult to gain a clear understanding of what the customer wants because:

Problems of scope: Users fail to define the boundary of the system
Problems of understanding: Users are not completely sure of what is needed.
Problems of volatility: The requirements change over the time.

The goal of Business Process Engineering(BPE) is to define architectures. Three different architectures are analyzed and design in the context of business objectives and goal:
Data architecture
Application architecture
Technology infrastructure

A number of key traits must exist among the people on an effective software team:
Competence
Common focus
Collaboration
Decision-making ability
Fuzzy problem-solving ability
Mutual trust and respect
Self organization

The people in other traditional disciplines such as software engineering, to recognize Web engineering as a new field or team.

Content analysis occur during modelling of web based applications.
content analysis or online textual analysis refers to a collection of research techniques used to describe and make inferences about online material through systematic coding and interpretation.

Some major Quality attributes in web applications:

Conceptual integrity, Maintainability, Reusability, Availability, Interoperability, Manageability, Performance, Reliability, Scalability,Security, Supportability, Testability, Usability.

Hypermedia pattern is used for web applications. The use of design pattern for web applications can increase the quality of their design and decrease the time and cost of design and implementation.

Types of System Testing:
Recovery testing: how well and quickly does the system recover from faults
Security testing: verify that protection mechanisms built into the system will protect from unauthorized access i.e hackers, disgruntled employees, fraudsters).
Stress testing: place abnormal load on the system
Performance testing: investigate the run-time performance within the context of an integrated system

Beta Testing is done by end users therefore it is also known as field testing.

Following are the interaction mechanism are available to application designers. These are used to implement navigation options:
– Navigation menus
-Graphic images
– Graphic icons

Lines of Code (LOC) is also known as Source Lines of Code (SLOC). It is software metric used to measure the size of a computer program by counting the number of lines in the text of the program’s source code.

Software quality metrics are a subset of software metrics that focus on the quality aspects of the product, process, and project.

The prototype model can serve as “the first system” Both the customer and developers like the prototyping paradigm. Users get a feel for the actual system, and developers get to build something immediately.

The interface design describes how the software communicates with system that interoperate with it, and with humans who use it. An interface implies a flow of information and a specific type of behavior.

Function oriented metrics were first proposed by Albrecht. Albrecht suggested a productivity measurement approach called the function point method.

Quality measure, metric and indicator are used to successfully measure quality of any software application.
– Quality measure: A measure is to ascertain by comparing to a standard.
– Quality metric: A metric is a quantitative measure of the degree to which a system, component or processes a given attribute.
-Quality indicator: It is a device or variable that is set to a prescribed state, based on the results of a process or the occurrence of a specified condition.

Metric – statistic that relates individual measures to one another.
Measure – provides a quantitative indication of the extent, amount, capacity, or size of some attribute of a product or process.
Indicator- metric or combination of metrics that provide insight into the software process, software project, or the product itself to make things better.

Process Indicators:

-Metrics should be collected so that process and product indicators can be ascertained.
-Process indicators enable software project managers to: assess project status, track potential risks, detect problem area early, adjust workflow or tasks, and evaluate team ability to control product quality.

software process model is used to solve actual problems in an industry setting, a software engineer or a team of engineers must incorporate a development strategy that encompasses the process, methods, and tools layers and the generic phases.
A process model for software engineering is chosen based on the nature of the project and application, the methods and tools to be used, and the controls and deliverable that are required.

-Real projects rarely follow the linear sequential model. Although the linear model can accommodate iteration, it does so indirectly. As a result, changes can cause confusion as the project team proceeds.
-Process development is a time consuming and expensive activity. Thus, the software development team utilizes the existing processes for different projects.

Phases of RAD model:

– Business Modeling
– Data modelling
– Process modelling
– Application generation
– Testing and turnover

Problem with RAD model is: it is not appropriate when technical risks are high.

A spiral model that contains six task regions:

-Customer communication: tasks required to establish effective communication between developer and customer.
-Planning:tasks required to define resources, timelines, and other project related information.
-Risk analysis: tasks required to assess both technical and management
risks.
-Engineering: tasks required to build one or more representations of the application.
-Construction and release: tasks required to construct, test, install, and provide user support i.e documentation and training.
-Customer evaluation: tasks required to obtain customer feedback based
on evaluation of the software representations created during the engineering stage and implemented during the installation stage.

Risk Analysis includes identifying, estimating, and monitoring technical feasibility and management risks, such as schedule slippage and cost overrun.

-To minimize the development schedule by making the adjustments necessary to avoid delays and mitigate potential problems.
-To assess product quality on an ongoing basis and when necessary, -Modify the technical approach to improve quality.

Product Metrics are Private to an individual and are often combined to develop Project Metrics that are Public to Software team.

Software metrics:
– Size-Oriented
– Function-oriented
– Extended function point

Measurements in the physical world can be categorized in two ways:

1) Direct measures
2) Indirect measures.
-Direct measures of the software engineering process include cost and effort applied. Direct measures of the product include lines of code produced, execution speed, memory size, and
defects reported over some set period of time.
– Size-oriented software metrics are derived by normalizing quality and/or productivity measures by considering the size of the software that has been produced.