Software Engineering Assessment 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A team's post-mortem assessment identifies that most defects were found only during system testing. Which earlier-phase practice would most directly address this?
- Shift-left testing (Correct answer)
- Continuous deployment
- Code obfuscation
- Feature flagging
Correct answer: Shift-left testing
Shift-left testing moves testing activities earlier in the development lifecycle to catch defects sooner and at lower cost.
Question 2: When assessing architectural quality, which pattern violation is described as a high-level module depending on a low-level module directly?
- Dependency Inversion Principle violation (Correct answer)
- Liskov Substitution Principle violation
- God Object anti-pattern
- Circular dependency
Correct answer: Dependency Inversion Principle violation
The Dependency Inversion Principle states high-level modules should depend on abstractions, not concrete low-level modules.
Question 3: In a usability assessment, a 'think-aloud protocol' requires participants to do what?
- Verbalize their thoughts while interacting with the system (Correct answer)
- Write down feedback after completing all tasks
- Rate the UI on a numeric scale
- Compete with other participants to complete tasks fastest
Correct answer: Verbalize their thoughts while interacting with the system
The think-aloud protocol captures real-time cognitive processes by having users narrate their thoughts during system interaction.
Question 4: Which measurement model assesses software reliability by tracking failure intervals over time?
- Software Reliability Growth Model (SRGM) (Correct answer)
- Function Point Analysis
- COCOMO II
- McCabe's Complexity Model
Correct answer: Software Reliability Growth Model (SRGM)
SRGMs (like the Jelinski-Moranda model) use observed failure data over time to estimate and predict software reliability.
Question 5: An independent verification and validation (IV&V) assessment differs from standard V&V primarily because it is performed by whom?
- A party organizationally independent from the development team (Correct answer)
- The same team that built the software
- End users of the product
- An automated CI/CD pipeline
Correct answer: A party organizationally independent from the development team
IV&V requires an independent third party to perform verification and validation, ensuring objectivity and avoiding conflicts of interest.
Question 6: In a code complexity assessment, a function with a cyclomatic complexity of 15 is generally considered to have which risk profile?
- High risk — difficult to test and maintain (Correct answer)
- Low risk — well-structured logic
- Medium risk — acceptable for enterprise software
- No risk — complexity only matters above 50
Correct answer: High risk — difficult to test and maintain
McCabe's guidelines classify cyclomatic complexity above 10 as high risk, suggesting the code is hard to test and prone to defects.
Question 7: During a readiness assessment before a production release, which criterion directly evaluates operational preparedness rather than software quality?
- Runbooks and rollback procedures are documented and tested (Correct answer)
- All unit tests pass
- Code review approval is obtained
- The feature branch is merged to main
Correct answer: Runbooks and rollback procedures are documented and tested
Runbooks and rollback procedures address operational readiness — the ability to run, monitor, and recover the system in production.
Software Engineering Assessment 4
A team's post-mortem assessment identifies that most defects were found only during system testing.
Which earlier-phase practice would most directly address this?