CSC 300 Software Engineering I Midterm Exam Study Notes

Spring 2013

Classical and Modern definitions of maintenance Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Fundamental workflows

Life cycle models o Code and Fix o Waterfall o Iteration and Incrementation o Synchronize and Stabilize o Rapid Prototyping o Agile, including Extreme Programming (XP) Definition of quality in the context of software engineering "Moving Target" problem Risk assessment risk and mitigation Miller's Law Stepwise refinement, Separation of Concerns, Design By Contract Verification vs. Validation Object-Oriented (OO) design paradigm vs. procedural ("non-OO") design paradigm Unit Testing o verification of correctness o code coverage o regression testing o risk assessment as it applies to testing

CSC 300 Software Engineering I Midterm Exam

April 3, 2013

This entire exam is closed book, closed notes, closed neighbor. I expect a good degree of forethought and organization in your answers. Length alone is not an indication of a good answer: clear, direct, concise answers that address the specific question asked are much more highly valued than an exhaustive laundry list of every term or concept that might be related to the question. Read the entire exam before you start answering any questions, and note the point value assigned to each question: the test is worth 80 points total, you have 80 minutes to complete the test, so you should plan on spending about one minute per point of question value (5 point question = 5 minutes). Remember, you have a total of 80 minutes to work on this exam - no extensions. Please include this question sheet with your answers when you are finished.

(questions will appear here)

The allotted time should be sufficient time for you to: a) read the questions; b) check the point value of each question and thereby determine how much time to spend on each question; c) mentally organize your knowledge and thoughts; d) mentally construct concise answers and then write them out. Failure to pay attention to (b) and (d) tends to result in answers that are too brief or too long (either disorganized and rambling, or more time-consuming than the point value warrants). If you finish the test and have substantial time left, you should go back and expand on your answers; if you find that you are running out of time, start writing more concise and "to the point" answers. As indicated in the opening instructions, you have the think and organize your answers before you start writing - for some of these questions, a "core dump" of knowledge could easily take close to an hour for just one question, and you obviously do not have that kind of time. A significant objective of this test is to assess your knowledge and understanding of the key concepts covered in the course; another is to assess your ability to distill out the key factors and uses for the concepts. Keep these objectives in mind as you construct your answers.