Exam Questions (Chapter 1-4, 8)
1. What is the most important difference between generic software product development
and custom software development? What might this mean in practice for users of generic
software products?
2. What are the four important attributes that all professional software should have? Suggest
four other attributes that may sometimes be significant.
3. What are the Eight Principles defined in the ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Task Force on
Software Engineering Ethics and Professional Practices?
4. Suggest why it is important to make a distinction between developing the user
requirements and developing system requirements in the requirements engineering
process.
5. What are the essential attributes of good software?
6. What are the two fundamental types of software product?
7. What are the four fundamental activities in software processes?
8. What software engineering fundamentals apply to all types of software systems?
9. What are the three benefits of incremental development, compared to the waterfall
model?
10. What are the two different approaches to process improvement and change that have been
proposed?
11. List 3 generic process models that are used in software engineering?
12. What are the shared characteristics of different agile methods of software development?
13. List the 5 principles of agile methods.
14. What is test-first development?
15. What are user requirements and system requirements?
16. What is the distinction between functional and non-functional requirements?
17. Give 5 reasons why eliciting requirements is difficult?
18. Explain why testing can only detect the presence of errors, not their absence.