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

High cohesion is a software design principle that states that all elements within a module or building block should be strongly related and focused on a single, well-defined task. This enhances readability, maintainability, and reusability.

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

The Dependency Inversion Principle suggests that high-level modules (like 'PaymentProcessing') should not depend on low-level modules (like 'CustomerDatabase'). Both should depend on abstractions (e.g., an interface like 'ICustomerRepository'). This inverts the typical dependency, decoupling the components and making the system more modular and testable.

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

A black-box description defines a building block from an external perspective, focusing on what it does, not how it does it. This includes its public interfaces (the 'how to use it'), its responsibilities (the 'what it does'), and any quality attributes (e.g., performance guarantees) that consumers can expect. Internal implementation details are part of the white-box view.

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

To maximize reusability, a building block should be flexible and adaptable. Using configurable parameters instead of hard-coding values allows the component to be customized for different environments and use cases without changing its internal code.

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

Tight coupling occurs when one component has intimate knowledge of the internal workings of another. Directly modifying another block's internal data structure is a classic example of high coupling, creating a fragile system where a change in block B can easily break block A.

CPSA Exam Practice Test

CPSA Exam Practice Test

CPSA Designing Building Blocks Questions and Answers