Test your basic knowledge |

Software Engineering Principles And Concepts

Instructions:

Answer 50 questions in 15 minutes.
If you are not ready to take this test, you can study here.
Match each statement with the correct term.
Don't refresh. All questions and answers are randomly picked and ordered every time you load a test.

This is a study tool. The 3 wrong answers for each question are randomly chosen from answers to other questions. So, you might find at times the answers obvious, but you will see it re-enforces your understanding as you take the test each time.

1. Steps to apply DARS #7. Score alternatives against desired objectives
Define the decision we are trying to make - what do we want to accomplish and what questions we will ask
The probability that a system or capability functions without failure for a specified time or number of natural units in a specified environment
Evaluate the remaining alternatives against the desired objectives and set a score that will show how well this alternative satisfy our desired objectives
What kind of defects do I make in my own work - How can I make fewer mistakes - How can I identify more defects that I overlooked in the past

2. Steps to apply DARS #9
Reviews - Test - Measurements - Analysis/Reporting - Process definition/Standards
The discipline dealing with what is good and bad. Moral duty and obligation. The principles of conduct governing and individual or group
Evaluate the remaining alternatives against the desired objectives and set a score that will show how well this alternative satisfy our desired objectives
Total value score - Sum of weights x values

3. Learning phase of IDEAL model
It is a semi formal language - partly mathematical. UML cannot describe constraints on model objects. Addresses invariants which are expressions holding true. Defines preconditions that must be true at the start of a method execution and post conditi
Lessons learned - have we achieved the desired features? - recommendations for future technologies insertions
Make the decision
Boundaries of services have to be explicit. Services are autonomous - standalone - do not have dependencies - Services share schema and contracts not classes and types. Platform neutral - Compatibility is policy based - policies define the contraints

4. User interface design principles
Targeted for teams. The goal is to produce effective teams by selecting skilled teams or providing tools to improve their skills.
An approach to construct and prove that a program is correct. Apply mathematical and logical techniques to analyze a program. Apply to system specification and system implementations. Not used for validation but are tied to verification.
User familiarity - User diversity - Consistency throughout the interface - Minimum surprise - Recoverability - User guidance
Define the decision we are trying to make - what do we want to accomplish and what questions we will ask

5. Steps to apply DARS #11
Lessons learned - have we achieved the desired features? - recommendations for future technologies insertions
How to integrate - to perform effectively on a team - How can you become a better team player
Make the decision
Team members establish common goals and define roles - Team: develops strategy - defines a customize process - participates in producing the plan and everyone understands the role - negotiates with management on the plan and resources - members fo wo

6. Beginning phases of the SEI IDEAL model
Initial - Identify and analyze what is the trigger to perform a particular insertion reliability - reduce cycle time - reduce cost - Context: How does this technology fits within the overall busines goals - Secure support: Management - executive - mo
The probability at any given time that a system or capabilty performs satisfactory in a specified environment
A registry or directory that provides a lookup so the consumer can browse the services
Generate test cases from operational profile - include low probability tests

7. Ethic
Do things in trial basis - pilot projects - collect information - analyze information - iterate
What kind of defects do I make in my own work - How can I make fewer mistakes - How can I identify more defects that I overlooked in the past
The discipline dealing with what is good and bad. Moral duty and obligation. The principles of conduct governing and individual or group
Is a group activity conducted at the end of a project cycle - where team members share knowledge gathered during the development of a project. They basically identify what went wrong - what worked well - how can they improve what they are doing - mak

8. The characteristics of a service
Boundaries of services have to be explicit. Services are autonomous - standalone - do not have dependencies - Services share schema and contracts not classes and types. Platform neutral - Compatibility is policy based - policies define the contraints
Learnability: How long does it take to learn the system - Speed of operation: How long does it take to complete a task - Robustness: Tolerance to errors - Recoverability: Ability to recover from errors - Adaptability: Being able to customize the inte
How do we size - resource and schedule plans - How do we estimate - What is the estimation process?
Strategies that software professionals use to solve recurring problems. Consist of a collection of general techniques - actions and tasks being use to solve recurring problems in an organization.

9. Benefits of project retrospectives
Task process patterns: Detailed steps to perform a task - Stage process patterns: Depict steps in a project stage - Phase process patterns: Depicts the interactions between stages process paterns
They have to objective - unambiguous and tailored to meet the needs
It help individuals to perform better - it helps to improve processes.
Define product - Define operational profile - Define failures - Prepare tests - Execute tests

10. Steps to perform a root cause analysis #1
Select the defects that will be analyse by the team and define the goals for the root cause analysis activities
Define failures intensity - allocate reliability among components
Total value score - Sum of weights x values
The discipline dealing with what is good and bad. Moral duty and obligation. The principles of conduct governing and individual or group

11. Root cause analysis...
Is group reasoning process applied to defect information to develop organizational understanding of the causes of a particular class of defects. A group of people analyze a group of defects to try to understand the causes of these defect.
Direct manipulations: Video games - Menu - Form Filling - Command languages - Natural languages
Its targeted for organizational capabilities - Organizations depend on teams to be mature and capable.
Algebraic Specification: Using methods from algebra - OBJ - Low level specifications - Syntax = signature and Semantic part = axioms. Model oriented specification: The state of the system - operations over the states.

12. PSP3
How to integrate - to perform effectively on a team - How can you become a better team player
Consider risks of selected alternatives
Process failure data - Tracking reliability growth - specify how fault tolerant architectures work - They rely on redundancy - They are able to recover by moving to a future state or restore to known safe state.
Formulation: Define proper metrics - Collection: Collect data on the metric - Analysis: Tools to look at data - charts - graphics - Interpretation: Gain insight - Feedback: Derive recommendations and take actions

13. Service consumer
Boundaries of services have to be explicit. Services are autonomous - standalone - do not have dependencies - Services share schema and contracts not classes and types. Platform neutral - Compatibility is policy based - policies define the contraints
Integrated Product and Process development is a systematic approach that achieves a timely collaboration of relevant stakeholders throughout the product life cycle to better satisfy customer needs. It involves the use of cross functional teams - inte
The extent that specific attributes of interest to the user are satisfied. It is defined in terms of attributes that are determined by the users.
Whatever uses the service - it can be an application or another service

14. Explain usability attributes
Learnability: How long does it take to learn the system - Speed of operation: How long does it take to complete a task - Robustness: Tolerance to errors - Recoverability: Ability to recover from errors - Adaptability: Being able to customize the inte
Diagnosing: Characterize current state versus desired state - Recommended actions for the technology insertion Identify potential barriers: legacy code - processes - standards - contracts - Establishing:What are the different actions - develop a pla
Establish liaison between groups - better processes and better documentation - do checklists - automated checking - work product templates and reviews - Training and staff- ins - Transcription - Tools for automated checking
Similar to the documentation of a design pattern. Specify a Name - Intent (Intended use of pattern) - Type (Task - Stage - Phase) - Initial Contact (Situation where the pattern solution applies to) - Solution (How the pattern solve the intended probl

15. Steps to apply DARS #2. Establish decision objectives
Test alternatives against required objectives - Make sure the alternatives identified meet the required objectives - otherwise disregard them
Reuse cycle time - costs - Interoperability - Scalabilty - Flexibility/Maintainability
Reviews - Test - Measurements - Analysis/Reporting - Process definition/Standards
Establish how much time do we have to make de decision - what resources are available.

16. Steps to perform a root cause analysis #2
Task process patterns: Detailed steps to perform a task - Stage process patterns: Depict steps in a project stage - Phase process patterns: Depicts the interactions between stages process paterns
Its targeted for organizational capabilities - Organizations depend on teams to be mature and capable.
Total value score - Sum of weights x values
Team hold a meeting to identify common root causes - common problems. Techniques such as Fishbone diagram are used in this phase to support the analysis.

17. Service locator
To prepare a software quality assurance plan - Participate in the development of the project process descriptions and definitions - Review software activities to verify compliance with the processes - Work product audits to verify compliance with pro
User analysis: undestand what users want to do with the system. Create scenarios - use cases - put the user in different situations - interview and talk to people - observe - Prorotyping: paper or executable prototypes - Evaluation - Using prototypes
Its targeted for organizational capabilities - Organizations depend on teams to be mature and capable.
A registry or directory that provides a lookup so the consumer can browse the services

18. Defect
Any flaw in the specification - design or implementation of a product.
Formulation: Define proper metrics - Collection: Collect data on the metric - Analysis: Tools to look at data - charts - graphics - Interpretation: Gain insight - Feedback: Derive recommendations and take actions
Describe common management techniques or organizational structures. A way to capture best practices within an organization.
The discipline dealing with what is good and bad. Moral duty and obligation. The principles of conduct governing and individual or group

19. Process pattern
Strategies that software professionals use to solve recurring problems. Consist of a collection of general techniques - actions and tasks being use to solve recurring problems in an organization.
Formulation: Define proper metrics - Collection: Collect data on the metric - Analysis: Tools to look at data - charts - graphics - Interpretation: Gain insight - Feedback: Derive recommendations and take actions
Team members establish common goals and define roles - Team: develops strategy - defines a customize process - participates in producing the plan and everyone understands the role - negotiates with management on the plan and resources - members fo wo
Define the decision we are trying to make - what do we want to accomplish and what questions we will ask

20. Metric
Quantitative measures of the defree to which some component possess a given attribute. Combination of measures.
Is a group activity conducted at the end of a project cycle - where team members share knowledge gathered during the development of a project. They basically identify what went wrong - what worked well - how can they improve what they are doing - mak
The extent that specific attributes of interest to the user are satisfied. It is defined in terms of attributes that are determined by the users.
Rank desired objectives in a 1 to 10 scale

21. Steps to apply DARS #5
How do we size - resource and schedule plans - How do we estimate - What is the estimation process?
Identify alternatives
User analysis: undestand what users want to do with the system. Create scenarios - use cases - put the user in different situations - interview and talk to people - observe - Prorotyping: paper or executable prototypes - Evaluation - Using prototypes
Task process patterns: Detailed steps to perform a task - Stage process patterns: Depict steps in a project stage - Phase process patterns: Depicts the interactions between stages process paterns

22. Other approaches to make decisions exist besides DARS
Things that should no be doing - comes from lessons learned
Directive Approach: A leader makes the decision alone - Consultative Approach: A leader makes the decision with the advise from other people - Democratic Approach: Some key team members vote for the best decision - Consensus Approach: Everybody parti
Intelectual property - use software without credit - develop tools that help people to violate intelectual property - Privacy: credit - health - personal information - Confidentiality - Quality of work
Consider risks of selected alternatives

23. Service broker
Identify required and desired objectives.
Product revision: Maintainability - testability - re- usability - Product transition: Move the product into a domain. Portability - Revisability - interoperability - Product operation: Correctness - reliability - usability - performance
For each of the alternatives calculate the weight of the alternatives x value of the criteria
A mediator - it connects the consumer with the service provider

24. Steps to apply DARS #3. Classify objectives
Try to achieve products with 3.4 defects per million opportunities - Define customer requirements - meet customer needs - know what the customer wants - Measure the process - collecting defect metrics - Analyze to determine causes - Improve. Eliminat
Team hold a meeting to identify common root causes - common problems. Techniques such as Fishbone diagram are used in this phase to support the analysis.
Targeted for teams. The goal is to produce effective teams by selecting skilled teams or providing tools to improve their skills.
Identify required and desired objectives.

25. Example of software engineering ethical scenarios
Intelectual property - use software without credit - develop tools that help people to violate intelectual property - Privacy: credit - health - personal information - Confidentiality - Quality of work
Reuse cycle time - costs - Interoperability - Scalabilty - Flexibility/Maintainability
Establish product and business goals - Assigning the roles of individuals within the team - Determine the development product strategy - Build top level plans - Develop quality plan - Conduct risk assesment - Team will prepare a management briefing -
Initial - Identify and analyze what is the trigger to perform a particular insertion reliability - reduce cycle time - reduce cost - Context: How does this technology fits within the overall busines goals - Secure support: Management - executive - mo

26. Identify 4 types of process patterns
Task process patterns: Detailed steps to perform a task - Stage process patterns: Depict steps in a project stage - Phase process patterns: Depicts the interactions between stages process paterns
Communicative failure - Missing or incomplete information - Oversight failure - Did not consider all the variables and left out important things - Education or lack of thereof - Lack of understanding - Typo - human error
Select the defects that will be analyse by the team and define the goals for the root cause analysis activities
Decision Analysis and Resolution Process. Is a well defined process to analyze possible decisions using formal evaluation process - it involves identifying criteria and evaluate alternatives. It helps to make decision objectively.

27. Software availability
Total value score - Sum of weights x values
Reuse cycle time - costs - Interoperability - Scalabilty - Flexibility/Maintainability
Learnability: How long does it take to learn the system - Speed of operation: How long does it take to complete a task - Robustness: Tolerance to errors - Recoverability: Ability to recover from errors - Adaptability: Being able to customize the inte
The probability at any given time that a system or capabilty performs satisfactory in a specified environment

28. PSP
Targeted for individuals. Analyse how an individual is doing his job - identify where you are spending your time - what mistakes are you making and how to improve the way you do your work. What is your process? Where do you spend your time? How good
Targeted for teams. The goal is to produce effective teams by selecting skilled teams or providing tools to improve their skills.
Requirements - Design - Test and Maintenance
Generate test cases from operational profile - include low probability tests

29. Characteristics of good metrics
Communicative failure - Missing or incomplete information - Oversight failure - Did not consider all the variables and left out important things - Education or lack of thereof - Lack of understanding - Typo - human error
Define product - Define operational profile - Define failures - Prepare tests - Execute tests
They have to objective - unambiguous and tailored to meet the needs
User analysis: undestand what users want to do with the system. Create scenarios - use cases - put the user in different situations - interview and talk to people - observe - Prorotyping: paper or executable prototypes - Evaluation - Using prototypes

30. CMMI
Reviews - Test - Measurements - Analysis/Reporting - Process definition/Standards
Its targeted for organizational capabilities - Organizations depend on teams to be mature and capable.
Generate test cases from operational profile - include low probability tests
The probability that a system or capability functions without failure for a specified time or number of natural units in a specified environment

31. Steps of the Software Reliability Engineering Process
Product revision: Maintainability - testability - re- usability - Product transition: Move the product into a domain. Portability - Revisability - interoperability - Product operation: Correctness - reliability - usability - performance
Learnability: How long does it take to learn the system - Speed of operation: How long does it take to complete a task - Robustness: Tolerance to errors - Recoverability: Ability to recover from errors - Adaptability: Being able to customize the inte
Integrated Product and Process development is a systematic approach that achieves a timely collaboration of relevant stakeholders throughout the product life cycle to better satisfy customer needs. It involves the use of cross functional teams - inte
Define product - Define operational profile - Define failures - Prepare tests - Execute tests

32. The Six Sigma for software engineering process
Consider risks of selected alternatives
Try to achieve products with 3.4 defects per million opportunities - Define customer requirements - meet customer needs - know what the customer wants - Measure the process - collecting defect metrics - Analyze to determine causes - Improve. Eliminat
Define the decision we are trying to make - what do we want to accomplish and what questions we will ask
Direct manipulations: Video games - Menu - Form Filling - Command languages - Natural languages

33. Where to apply formal methods
For each of the alternatives calculate the weight of the alternatives x value of the criteria
Communicative failure - Missing or incomplete information - Oversight failure - Did not consider all the variables and left out important things - Education or lack of thereof - Lack of understanding - Typo - human error
Requirements - Design - Test and Maintenance
They have to objective - unambiguous and tailored to meet the needs

34. How to avoid those defects
Total value score - Sum of weights x values
Establish how much time do we have to make de decision - what resources are available.
Direct manipulations: Video games - Menu - Form Filling - Command languages - Natural languages
Establish liaison between groups - better processes and better documentation - do checklists - automated checking - work product templates and reviews - Training and staff- ins - Transcription - Tools for automated checking

35. The documentation of process paterns
Identify use cases - occurrence probability - Engineer Just Right reliability
Formulation: Define proper metrics - Collection: Collect data on the metric - Analysis: Tools to look at data - charts - graphics - Interpretation: Gain insight - Feedback: Derive recommendations and take actions
How to integrate - to perform effectively on a team - How can you become a better team player
Similar to the documentation of a design pattern. Specify a Name - Intent (Intended use of pattern) - Type (Task - Stage - Phase) - Initial Contact (Situation where the pattern solution applies to) - Solution (How the pattern solve the intended probl

36. Some examples of formal methods implementations
Algebraic Specification: Using methods from algebra - OBJ - Low level specifications - Syntax = signature and Semantic part = axioms. Model oriented specification: The state of the system - operations over the states.
Reviews - Test - Measurements - Analysis/Reporting - Process definition/Standards
An application function packaged as a reusable component for use in some process - typically a business or application process.
How to integrate - to perform effectively on a team - How can you become a better team player

37. Antipattern
Rank desired objectives in a 1 to 10 scale
Product revision: Maintainability - testability - re- usability - Product transition: Move the product into a domain. Portability - Revisability - interoperability - Product operation: Correctness - reliability - usability - performance
Things that should no be doing - comes from lessons learned
Define product - Define operational profile - Define failures - Prepare tests - Execute tests

38. Steps to perform a root cause analysis #3
Is a group activity conducted at the end of a project cycle - where team members share knowledge gathered during the development of a project. They basically identify what went wrong - what worked well - how can they improve what they are doing - mak
Focus on customer needs - Reduce costs - Helps to make better decisions - Reduce time - Reduce risks
From the common root causes identified in the previous meeting - the team select the ones that they will be addressing. The root causes selected will be usually the ones that cause a lot of the defects.
Integrated Product and Process development is a systematic approach that achieves a timely collaboration of relevant stakeholders throughout the product life cycle to better satisfy customer needs. It involves the use of cross functional teams - inte

39. Benefits of IPPD?
They eliminate contradiction - ambiguities - vagueness and incompleteness from normal language descriptions. The disasvantages are the time/effort needed - the complexity - there are interface issues - they are cumbersome.
Focus on customer needs - Reduce costs - Helps to make better decisions - Reduce time - Reduce risks
How do we size - resource and schedule plans - How do we estimate - What is the estimation process?
Identify required and desired objectives.

40. Steps to apply DARS #1. Draft decision statement
Define the decision we are trying to make - what do we want to accomplish and what questions we will ask
The individual establish a personal performance baseline - Recognize how you do your job - Document personal processing - Gather data on where do you spend your time - Gather data on the errors you make
Focus on customer needs - Reduce costs - Helps to make better decisions - Reduce time - Reduce risks
Targeted for individuals. Analyse how an individual is doing his job - identify where you are spending your time - what mistakes are you making and how to improve the way you do your work. What is your process? Where do you spend your time? How good

41. Service provider
Develop and evaluate proposed solutions to eliminte defect root causes
The one who implements the service - it can be a network addressable entity - it needs to be able to accept and execute requests from consumer - it needs to publish a service description in a service registry that contains the collection of service d
A mediator - it connects the consumer with the service provider
Quantitative measures of the defree to which some component possess a given attribute. Combination of measures.

42. Service Oriented Architecture
To prepare a software quality assurance plan - Participate in the development of the project process descriptions and definitions - Review software activities to verify compliance with the processes - Work product audits to verify compliance with pro
The approach to build distributed systems that deliver application functionality as services to end user applications or to build other services.
Initial - Identify and analyze what is the trigger to perform a particular insertion reliability - reduce cycle time - reduce cost - Context: How does this technology fits within the overall busines goals - Secure support: Management - executive - mo
Any flaw in the specification - design or implementation of a product.

43. Define operational profile
Decision Analysis and Resolution Process. Is a well defined process to analyze possible decisions using formal evaluation process - it involves identifying criteria and evaluate alternatives. It helps to make decision objectively.
Task process patterns: Detailed steps to perform a task - Stage process patterns: Depict steps in a project stage - Phase process patterns: Depicts the interactions between stages process paterns
Do things in trial basis - pilot projects - collect information - analyze information - iterate
Identify use cases - occurrence probability - Engineer Just Right reliability

44. Retrospective - lessons learned or project post- mortem
Define product - Define operational profile - Define failures - Prepare tests - Execute tests
Targeted for teams. The goal is to produce effective teams by selecting skilled teams or providing tools to improve their skills.
Is a group activity conducted at the end of a project cycle - where team members share knowledge gathered during the development of a project. They basically identify what went wrong - what worked well - how can they improve what they are doing - mak
Intelectual property - use software without credit - develop tools that help people to violate intelectual property - Privacy: credit - health - personal information - Confidentiality - Quality of work

45. Goals for root cause analysis...
Intelectual property - use software without credit - develop tools that help people to violate intelectual property - Privacy: credit - health - personal information - Confidentiality - Quality of work
Reduce repair or re work cause - eliminate high priority problems and reduce error type
It is a semi formal language - partly mathematical. UML cannot describe constraints on model objects. Addresses invariants which are expressions holding true. Defines preconditions that must be true at the start of a method execution and post conditi
What kind of defects do I make in my own work - How can I make fewer mistakes - How can I identify more defects that I overlooked in the past

46. IPT
The probability that a system or capability functions without failure for a specified time or number of natural units in a specified environment
User familiarity - User diversity - Consistency throughout the interface - Minimum surprise - Recoverability - User guidance
Reuse cycle time - costs - Interoperability - Scalabilty - Flexibility/Maintainability
Integrated Product Team is a group of people that has complementary skills and expertise - fully empowered to represent stakeohlders - to make the appropriate decisions. A team of people that comes from different backgrounds - with different skillset

47. PSP2
Task process patterns: Detailed steps to perform a task - Stage process patterns: Depict steps in a project stage - Phase process patterns: Depicts the interactions between stages process paterns
Its targeted for organizational capabilities - Organizations depend on teams to be mature and capable.
What kind of defects do I make in my own work - How can I make fewer mistakes - How can I identify more defects that I overlooked in the past
The probability that a system or capability functions without failure for a specified time or number of natural units in a specified environment

48. The steps to launch a TSP Team
Initial - Identify and analyze what is the trigger to perform a particular insertion reliability - reduce cycle time - reduce cost - Context: How does this technology fits within the overall busines goals - Secure support: Management - executive - mo
Product revision: Maintainability - testability - re- usability - Product transition: Move the product into a domain. Portability - Revisability - interoperability - Product operation: Correctness - reliability - usability - performance
Is group reasoning process applied to defect information to develop organizational understanding of the causes of a particular class of defects. A group of people analyze a group of defects to try to understand the causes of these defect.
Establish product and business goals - Assigning the roles of individuals within the team - Determine the development product strategy - Build top level plans - Develop quality plan - Conduct risk assesment - Team will prepare a management briefing -

49. The measurement process
Requirements - Design - Test and Maintenance
Identify alternatives
The extent that specific attributes of interest to the user are satisfied. It is defined in terms of attributes that are determined by the users.
Formulation: Define proper metrics - Collection: Collect data on the metric - Analysis: Tools to look at data - charts - graphics - Interpretation: Gain insight - Feedback: Derive recommendations and take actions

50. Steps to apply DARS #10
Identify required and desired objectives.
Consider risks of selected alternatives
The approach to build distributed systems that deliver application functionality as services to end user applications or to build other services.
Process failure data - Tracking reliability growth - specify how fault tolerant architectures work - They rely on redundancy - They are able to recover by moving to a future state or restore to known safe state.