Software Engineering So Far: A Midterm study guide

Halfway into the semester and we've covered a sizable amount of content with respect to Software Engineering. It's interesting to see how early on we learned about coding standards and how it has come full circle when it comes to dealing with build systems and configuration management. Without some kind of standard going on, all there ever will be is confusion and frustration. Below are five sample midterm questions I believe are important when it comes to what we've learned so far in the semester. None of the questions are cherry picked as I believe all the material is important in one way or another.

The following are five questions and answers about the topics I've learned up until this point.

1) What is Ant?

Ant is a scripting tool that lets you construct your build scripts in much the same way as the "make" tool in C or C++.


2) Ant properties are immutable. Explain what this means and give an example.

Once Ant properties are set they cannot be changed within the build process. For example,


MyProperty = ${MyProperty}

MyProperty = ${MyProperty}

Will print the following:

[echo] MyProperty = One
[echo] MyProperty = One


3) When deploying new software configuration management tools it's always good practice to use common build tools. Why?

Much time is wasted when a developer cannot reproduce a problem found in testing, or when the released product varies from what is tested. Ensuring that everyone working a project is using the same tools will make tracking down a problem easier.


4) List and explain what a software review exposes that testing does not.

Various answers include:

Reviews are pro-active tests. Find errors not possible through testing such as an unimplemented requirement.

5) ICS-SE-Java-2 says not use the wildcard "*" in import statements. Why?

You must explicitly import each class that you use from other packages. This is an important form of documentation to readers of your class. It doesn't really make sense for a program to throw in the kitchen sink when solving a problem.