Exam 1 Review

Disclaimer: The following is intended to help you in your review for the first hour exam. While I have made every effort to be complete, please remember that you are responsible for all of the material covered so far this term (through Friday's lecture).

The exam will cover chapters 1 - 10 (through section 10.1.1). Chapter 30, assigned as reading, will be covered on the next exam.

General Comments

Please review definitions that have come up over the past several weeks. Be able to describe terms that we have used.

The exam will be a combination of short answer questions together with some technical questions (such as "construct a task chart and determine the critical path". The "Key Points" at the end of each chapter are a good starting point for review, as are the exercises (assigned and not assigned).

Specifics

• Chapter 1: Be familiar with the software development process generally and with the various models for software development discussed in the chapter. Review risk resolution.
• Chapter 2: Be able to describe the process of systems engineering, and the role that human factors play.
• Chapter 3: Be able to describe the role of management in the software development process, and the tasks that management undertakes. Be able to construct activity networks and activity bar charts, identify critical paths, and discuss what might happen if a task takes longer than expected to complete.
• Chapter 4: Be able to describe the requirements engineering process. Definitions are important throughout the assigned material, but pay particular attention to them here. A practical question might be along the lines of exercise 4.6.
• Chapter 5: Be comfortable with the VORD method as described in this chapter, and be able to explain why this approach might be useful. What is a stakeholder? A viewpoint?
• Chapter 6: Be able to work with basic system models as described in the chapter together with the finite state automaton discussed in lecture. This chapter gave a very quick overview of these models, so exam examples will be selected to be straightforward and not too complicated.
• Chapter 7: Be able to separate functional and non-functional requirements (with justifications) and develop more precise specifications from imprecise ones.
• Chapter 8: Be able to explain the various ways in which prototyping can be used (as well as, of course, being able to give a definition of prototyping).
• Chapter 9: Be able to explain the ideas behind formal specification. Be able to write simple predicate expressions giving pre conditions and post conditions. Be able to translate a predicate expression into a user-friendly form of English.
• Chapter 10: (so far) Be able to interpret a formal algebraic specification of a suitably straight-forward ADT.