Software Engineering Prep 4 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which Agile ceremony is specifically designed to inspect the team's process and identify improvements?
- Sprint Planning
- Daily Standup
- Sprint Review
- Retrospective (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Retrospective
The retrospective focuses on how the team worked — not what was built — to continuously improve collaboration and process.
Question 2: What does 'coupling' measure in software design?
- How many lines of code a module contains
- How much one module depends on another (Correct answer)
- How many tests cover a class
- How frequently a function is called
Correct answer: How much one module depends on another
Coupling measures the degree of interdependence between software modules; low coupling is preferred for maintainability.
Question 3: Which sorting algorithm has an average-case time complexity of O(n log n)?
- Bubble Sort
- Insertion Sort
- Selection Sort
- Merge Sort (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Merge Sort
Merge Sort divides the array recursively and merges in sorted order, achieving O(n log n) in all cases.
Question 4: In object-oriented programming, what is polymorphism?
- The ability to hide internal implementation details
- The ability for objects of different types to be treated through a common interface (Correct answer)
- The process of combining data and methods into a class
- Inheriting all properties from a parent class
Correct answer: The ability for objects of different types to be treated through a common interface
Polymorphism allows different classes to be treated uniformly via a shared interface while exhibiting different behaviors.
Question 5: What is the purpose of environment variables in software deployment?
- To store compiled binary files
- To define CSS styling for different environments
- To externalize configuration so the same code runs in dev, staging, and production (Correct answer)
- To track user session data
Correct answer: To externalize configuration so the same code runs in dev, staging, and production
Environment variables decouple configuration from code, enabling the same build artifact to behave differently per environment.
Question 6: Which HTTP status code indicates a client-side error where the requested resource was not found?
- 200
- 301
- 404 (Correct answer)
- 500
Correct answer: 404
HTTP 404 Not Found means the server could not locate the resource at the requested URL.
Question 7: What is 'refactoring' in software engineering?
- Rewriting an application in a new programming language
- Improving internal code structure without changing external behavior (Correct answer)
- Adding new features to an existing system
- Fixing bugs reported by end users
Correct answer: Improving internal code structure without changing external behavior
Refactoring improves code readability, maintainability, or performance while preserving the observable behavior of the system.
Software Engineering Prep 4
Which Agile ceremony is specifically designed to inspect the team's process and identify improvements?