Software Engineering Basic Software Engineering 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which software development model is best suited for projects where requirements are well-understood and unlikely to change?
- Agile
- Waterfall (Correct answer)
- Spiral
- Scrum
Correct answer: Waterfall
The Waterfall model works best when requirements are stable and fully defined upfront, following a strict sequential flow.
Question 2: What does the term 'technical debt' refer to in software engineering?
- The cost of hardware needed to run software
- Accumulated cost of shortcuts and poor design decisions made for short-term gain (Correct answer)
- Money owed to software vendors for licenses
- The time needed to train developers on a new codebase
Correct answer: Accumulated cost of shortcuts and poor design decisions made for short-term gain
Technical debt represents the implied future rework caused by choosing an easy solution now instead of a better approach that would take longer.
Question 3: In object-oriented programming, what is encapsulation?
- Inheriting properties from a parent class
- Bundling data and methods that operate on that data within a single unit, restricting direct access (Correct answer)
- Creating multiple classes with the same method name
- Defining a class that cannot be instantiated
Correct answer: Bundling data and methods that operate on that data within a single unit, restricting direct access
Encapsulation hides an object's internal state and exposes only what is necessary through a public interface.
Question 4: What is a 'use case' in software requirements analysis?
- A test scenario written by QA engineers
- A description of how a user interacts with a system to achieve a specific goal (Correct answer)
- A list of all the functions a system must perform
- A diagram showing the database schema
Correct answer: A description of how a user interacts with a system to achieve a specific goal
A use case captures the interaction between an actor and a system to accomplish a particular objective.
Question 5: Which version control operation integrates changes from one branch into another?
- Commit
- Clone
- Merge (Correct answer)
- Push
Correct answer: Merge
Merging combines the history and changes of one branch into another, reconciling differences between them.
Question 6: What does DRY stand for in software engineering principles?
- Define, Refactor, Yield
- Don't Repeat Yourself (Correct answer)
- Distribute, Reuse, Yield
- Dynamic Runtime Yardstick
Correct answer: Don't Repeat Yourself
DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) states that every piece of knowledge should have a single, unambiguous representation in a system.
Question 7: What is the primary purpose of a software design pattern?
- To enforce a specific programming language syntax
- To provide reusable solutions to commonly occurring design problems (Correct answer)
- To replace the need for unit testing
- To document the history of code changes
Correct answer: To provide reusable solutions to commonly occurring design problems
Design patterns are proven templates that address recurring design problems, improving code reuse and maintainability.
Software Engineering Basic Software Engineering 2
Which software development model is best suited for projects where requirements are well-understood and unlikely to change?