CPSA Cross-cutting Concepts Questions and Answers

Question 1

An architect is designing a large-scale enterprise system with multiple services.
The requirements state that every action that modifies data must be logged for auditing purposes, and every incoming request must be checked for valid authentication credentials.
How are these two requirements best categorized?

Accepted Answer

As cross-cutting concepts that affect multiple services.

Answer

As core business logic for their respective services.

Answer

As deployment view concerns to be handled by infrastructure.

Answer

As specific quality attributes tied to reliability.

Question 2

Which of the following is the most significant architectural risk of implementing cross-cutting concerns by duplicating the necessary code within every affected building block?

Accepted Answer

An increase in system complexity and severe maintenance challenges.

Answer

A decrease in system performance due to code bloat.

Answer

A violation of the single responsibility principle for each block.

Answer

Difficulty in documenting the system's runtime view.

Question 3

Which of the following is LEAST likely to be considered a cross-cutting concept in software architecture?

Accepted Answer

User account creation logic.

Answer

Transaction management.

Answer

Security authorization checks.

Answer

System-wide caching strategy.

Question 4

A development team is building a microservices-based application. To handle security, the architect decides that each service should not implement its own authentication and authorization logic. Instead, an API Gateway will intercept all incoming requests, validate credentials, and enrich request headers before forwarding them to the appropriate service. This approach is a strategy for what?

Accepted Answer

Centralizing the implementation of a cross-cutting concern.

Answer

Increasing the cohesion of each microservice.

Answer

Decoupling the system from specific infrastructure.

Answer

Improving the observability of the runtime view.

Question 5

According to the iSAQB curriculum, what is the primary purpose of defining and documenting cross-cutting concepts?

Accepted Answer

To ensure the conceptual integrity and consistency of the architecture.

Answer

To provide a complete component specification for third-party developers.

Answer

To map business requirements directly to building blocks.

Answer

To satisfy legal and compliance requirements for auditing.

Question 6

An architect needs to introduce a performance monitoring mechanism. The goal is to measure and log the execution time of specific methods in the business and data access layers without modifying the source code of those methods. Which technology or programming paradigm is specifically designed to address this type of challenge?

Accepted Answer

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP).

Answer

Containerization (e.g., Docker).

Answer

Dependency Injection (DI).

Answer

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).