Advice: except for the first question, which might be 1 page, the other answers can be completed in ½ page, but feel free to write more. .

Remember: In exams, usually more is better

Question 1:

1. Why does it take so long to get software finished?

2. Why are development costs so high?

3. Why can't we find all errors before we give the software to our customers?

4. Why do we spend so much time and effort maintaining existing programs?

5. Why do we continue to have difficulty in measuring progress as software is being developed?

Question 2:

You are a software engineer and project manager, a customer approaches you and wishes you to develop a software product for them

Some details

1) The interview process went well with the customer, except there was limited detail, and you are not sure if the customer has sufficient detail.

2) Your engineering group mostly young, freshly out of college, there are few older seasoned engineers that have done large projects before

3) You have a 1 year time limit

4) Your management believes in you and wishes to stay out of the technical details, only requires monthly reviews of progress

5) The product lifetime will be 5-7 years.

6) You have a (Quality Assurance) QA department

7) You have continuing engineering (support after the release of the product)

You have decided to use Agile process:

These are the Agile Process Models

1) Extreme Programming (XP)

2) Adaptive Software Development (ASD)

3) Scrum

4) Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)

5) Crystal

6) Feature Driven Development (FDD)

7) Lean Software Development (LSD)

8) Agile Modeling (AM)

9) Agile Unified Process (AUP)

Choose one and explain how it would fit your requirements, also explain how the QA department and the Continuing Engineering department would be involved)

Question 3

When and how should you use rapid prototyping in the agile process
(you may use your solution to problem 2, but you may not decide that you would not use rapid prototyping)

Question 4

In requirements gathering you use these techniques:

• Inception (software engineers use context-free questions to establish a basic understanding of the problem, the people who want a solution, the nature of the solution, and the effectiveness of the collaboration between customers and developers)

• Elicitation (find out from customers what the product objectives are, what is to be done, how the product fits into business needs, and how the product is used on a day to day basis)

• Elaboration (focuses on developing a refined technical model of software function, behavior, and information)

• Negotiation (requirements are categorized and organized into subsets, relations among requirements identified, requirements reviewed for correctness, requirements prioritized based on customer needs)

• Specification (written work products produced describing the function, performance, and development constraints for a computer-based system)

• Requirements validation (formal technical reviews used to examine the specification work products to ensure requirement quality and that all work products conform to agreed upon standards for the process, project, and products)

• Requirements management (activities that help project team to identify, control, and track requirements and changes as project proceeds, similar to software configuration management (SCM) techniques

Choose 1 and make an good argument why your choice is more important than the others?

Question 5

Regarding design:

FURPS Quality Factors

• Functionality - feature set and program capabilities

• Usability - human factors (aesthetics, consistency, documentation)

• Reliability - frequency and severity opf failure

• Performance - processing speed, response time, throughput, efficiency

• Supportability - maintainability (extensibility, adaptability, serviceability), testability, compatibility, configurability

Referencing question 1 solution, make an argument of which of FURPS is the most important and why?

Question 6

All modern programming languages implement the structured programming constructs, Provide examples from three programming languages that show structured programming constructs.

Question 7

Are stepwise refinement and refactoring the same thing? Give an example of each and describe why they are different

Question 8

How do you control concurrency in the agile process, Give examples

Question 9.

Explain the cost of quality in terms of prevention, appraisal and failure, Give examples

Question 10

How is component-based development used during the requirements gathering and definition within the Agile process