Software Development Lifecycle - Essay Examination Questions

Part A and Part B Format

This question paper consists of Part A and Part B only

Final Examination (Essay)

2. Read Carefully the instructions for each part.

1. Please use this format: MSWord document, Times New Roman font size 12, and a line spacing of 1.5.

3. Includes graphs, graphics and other related items to better explain your answers.

4. Total number of answer pages Should not exceed 20 pages.

 

Part A contains two questions. Answer all.

1. When analysing the Fault Introduction and Fault Detection profile across the different lifecycle phases, two metrics are used to measure the effective and efficient operation of a software company.

(b) Select any three phases of the Software Development Lifecycle. For each phase, specify what you consider to be strong performance targets for both metrics listed in 1

 

(a) Where applicable. Justify why the values you specify represent strong performance.

2. According to the ISO 12207 standard, the purpose of Configuration Management (CM) is to: manage and control system elements and configurations over the life cycle.

(a) The CMMI-DEV has a process area named "configuration management". The purpose of this process area is to: establish and maintain the integrity of work products using configuration identification, configuration control, configuration status accounting, and configuration audits. Identify and illustrate the representation of the CMMI recommendations for CM. 

(b) Describe these two metrics, explaining how they are calculated.

(c) Describe FIVE benefits of good configuration management. 

1. Using documents such as request for proposal (RFP) document and software requirements specifications (SRS) document, the software developer must extract the information needed to define specifications for both the functional requirements and performance or non-functional requirements required by the client.

 

(a) What is the difference between a business requirement and a functional requirement?

2. It has long been accepted that continuous process improvement is based on many small evolutionary steps rather than larger revolutionary innovations. The Capability Maturity Model (CMM) provides a framework for organising these evolutionary steps into five maturity levels that lay successive foundations for continuous process improvement.

(a) Describe the characteristics of a typical company at level 5 in the SW-CMM (Capability Maturity Model for Software).

Change Management and Process Change Management. Describe these two KPAs in detail.

3. The purpose of inspection, according to the IEEE 1028 standard, is to detect and identify anomalies of a software product including errors and deviations from standards and specifications.

(a) A formal Peer Review mechanism, such as the Software Inspection process proposed by Michael Fagan, requires that the software organisation adopts a rigorous approach to maximise the effectiveness of inspections.

 

Provide a detailed description of the Seven steps involved in the Fagan Inspection process.

(c) Provide a detailed example of a Peer Review process infrastructure that would be assessed by a CMMI maturity level of Quantitatively Managed.

 

Your example should include a description of how a quantitative/statistical understanding of the performance from the Peer Review processes is derived, and how to quantitatively manage quality of the product/project using quality and process performance objectives.

 

As part of your answer, address issues such as containment effectiveness metrics, control metrics and interface with the overall quality management system.

 (d) Describe the steps recommended for defining non-functional requirements.

 (e) Two of the Key Process Areas (KPA)s at level 5 of the SW-CMM are: Technology

4. You have been promoted as the SQA specialist at your organisation. The manager asks you to assess the quality of software projects quantitatively.

(a) Explain what need to be implemented first and then the assessment approach that can be used.

(b) In assessing the quality of the requirements phase, which concepts of conformity evaluation can you use for this life cycle phase?

5. For some critical systems, a standard imposes that the developer demonstrates to the client that there is no dead code in the final product. Explain why this requirement is imposed by the customer?