CPSA Designing Building Blocks Questions and Answers

Question 1

When designing the building block view of a software system, which of the following is the primary goal of striving for high cohesion within individual building blocks?

Accepted Answer

To ensure that a building block is responsible for a single, well-defined purpose.

Answer

To minimize the dependencies a building block has on other building blocks.

Answer

To allow multiple, unrelated functionalities to be managed in a single component.

Answer

To increase the number of operations a building block's public interface exposes.

Question 2

An architect is designing a new e-commerce system. They have created a 'PaymentProcessing' building block. To improve maintainability and testability, this block should not directly access the 'CustomerDatabase'. Which design principle should the architect apply to decouple these two building blocks?

Accepted Answer

Dependency Inversion Principle

Answer

Single Responsibility Principle

Answer

Open/Closed Principle

Answer

Liskov Substitution Principle

Question 3

You are documenting a building block for other teams to use. What information is essential to include in the black-box description?

Accepted Answer

Its public interfaces, responsibilities, and required quality attributes.

Answer

The internal algorithms and private helper methods used.

Answer

The specific database schema tables it directly manipulates.

Answer

The hierarchical decomposition into smaller, internal building blocks.

Question 4

A team is building a reusable 'Logging' component. To ensure it can be used across many different projects with varying requirements, which practice is most critical?

Accepted Answer

Using configurable parameters and avoiding hard-coded values.

Answer

Tightly coupling the component to the company's main application framework.

Answer

Hard-coding configuration values like file paths and log levels for consistency.

Answer

Designing the component to handle only a single, specific logging format.

Question 5

Which of the following scenarios best describes tight coupling between two building blocks?

Accepted Answer

Building block A directly modifies a data structure that is internal to building block B.

Answer

Building block A sends an asynchronous message to a queue that building block B reads from.

Answer

Building block A calls an interface that building block B implements.

Answer

Building block A and B are deployed in separate microservices.

Question 6

An architect is reviewing a system design and finds a single building block that manages user authentication, generates PDF reports, and sends email notifications. Which design principle is most clearly being violated?

Accepted Answer

Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)

Answer

Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY)

Answer

Interface Segregation Principle (ISP)

Answer

Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)