Final Exam Flashcards
1
Q
What is a process?
A
A collection of work activities, actions and tasks that are performed when some work product is to be created
2
Q
What a methodology addresses?
A
Introducing new people to the process, substituting people, delineating responsibilities, demonstrating visibile progress
3
Q
How do you evaluate a methodology?
A
How rapidly you can substitute or train people, how great an effect i has on the sales process, how much freedom it is to people on the project, how fast it allows people to respond to changing situations, how well it protects the organization - legally or from other damages
4
Q
What are the elements of a methodology?
A
Teams, Roles, Skills, Techniques, Activities, Process, Work Products, Milestones, Standards, Quality
5
Q
What are some characteristics of plan driven methodologies?
A
- Focus on repeatability and predictability
- Define, standardized, and incrementally improving processes
- Thorough documentation
- Software architecture defined up-front
- detailed plans, workflows, roles, responsibilities, and work product descriptions
- process group containing resources for specialists: process monitoring, controlling, and educating
- ongoing risk management
- focus on verification and validation
6
Q
What are the three plan-driven methodologies?
A
- Personal software process
- Team Software Process
- Rational Unified Process
7
Q
What is PSP (personal software process)?
A
Individual process methodology. Structured framework of forms, guidelines, and procedures intended to guide an engineer in using a defined, measured, planned, and quality controlled process
- Goal is to access individual development skills to improve performane
- Evolutionary improvement approach.
- “early defect detection is much less expensive than later defect removal”
- each level has detailed scripts, checklists, and templates to guide the engineer through the required steps
8
Q
What are some PSP artifacts?
A
Scripts (orderly structure of steps for each phase of development and review), Forms (data collection for defect recording, time recording, and project planning), checklists (design, coding, etc)
9
Q
What are the advantages of PSP?
A
Improved size & time estimation, improved productivity, reduced testing time, improve quality
10
Q
What are the disadvantages of PSP?
A
Pushback of forms & detailed data recording, requires discipline and opportunity to work ton TSP teams
11
Q
What is the Team Software Process (TSP)?
A
Team planning, building, and control. Project divided into overlapping, iterative development cycles. Each cycle is a mini waterfall consisting of cycle launch, strategy, planning, requirements, design, implementation, test, and postmortem
12
Q
Advantages of TSP?
A
Scripted (consistent) process activities, teams take ownership of their process and plans, process improvement focus, visibile tracking.
13
Q
Disadvantages of TSP?
A
Similar to PSP (artifact centric, high ceremony), doesn’t scale well for small teams/short projects)
14
Q
What are the phases of the RUP model?
A
Inception phase (what to do, business case, scope. Initial project plan, define risks),
Elaboration phase (analyze the problem domain and define a technically feasible architecture. Mitigate highest risks, make detailed project plan with prioritized risks),
Construction phase (Develop, integrate and test. Provide user documentation), and
Transition phase (distribute the product to the customers and maintain it).
15
Q
What are the supporting workflows to RUP?
A
- Project Management (management of competing objectives, risks to the project and successful delivery of a product)
- Configuration and Change Management (Managment of parallel development, deve done at multiple sites, change requests)
- Environment (Provide tools to a sw project and adaptation of RUP to a specific project)
16
Q
What is the basic process of estimations?
A
- Estimate the size of the product
- Estimate the effort (man-months)
- Estimate the schedule
17
Q
What are some estimation techniques?
A
Top down, bottom up, analogy, expert judgement, priced to win, parametric or algorithmic method
18
Q
Describe (inc. pros and cons) of top-down estimations
A
- Based on overall characteristics of a project.
+ Easy to calculate
+ Effective early on - Some models are questionable or may not fit
- Less accurate because it doesn’t look at the details
19
Q
Describe (inc. pros and cons) of bottom-up estimation
A
- Create a WBS to identify individual tasks to be done
- Add from the bottom-up
+ Works well if activities are well understood - Specific activities are not always known
- More time consuming
20
Q
Describe (inc. pros and cons) of expert judgement
A
Use somebody who has recent experience on a similar project. You get a guesstimate, accuracy depends on their ‘real’ expertise, comparable application(s) must be accurately chosen
21
Q
Describe (inc. pros and cons) of estimation by analogy
A
Use past project (must be sufficiently similar, comparable attributes) \+ Based on actual historical data - Difficult matching project types - Prior data may have been mis-measured - How to measure differences
22
Q
Describe algorithmic measures
A
Lines of Code (LOC), function points, feature points or object points. LOC and function poits most common, majority of projects use non of the above
23
Q
What are the pros and cons of code-based estimations?
A
\+ Commonly understood metric \+ Permits specific comparisons \+ Actuals easily measured - Difficult to estimate early in cycle - Counts vary by language - Many costs not considered (ex. reqs) - Programmers may be rewarded based on this (#defects/#LOC) - Code generators produce excess code
24
Q
What are some estimation issues with LOC?
A
- How do you know how many in advance?
- What about different languages?
- What about programmer style?
- Most algo approaches are more effective after requirements (or have to be after)
25
Describe wideband delphi, including pros and cons
Grop consensus approach
+ Easy, inexpensive, utilizes expertise of several people
+ Does not require historical data
- Difficult to repeat
- May fail to reach consensus, reach wrong one, or may have same bias
26
Describe function points
Software size measured by number & complexity of functions it performs, more methodical than LOC counts
27
Describe code reuse and estimation?
If code is more than 50% modified, its "new"
Reused code take 30% effort of new
Modified is 60% of new
Integration effort with reused code almost as expensive as with new code
28
Describe COCOMO
Input - LOC
Output - Persons Months
Biggest weakness is that it requires input of product size estimate in LOC
29
What are some issues with over estimations?
- Project will not be funded
- Parkinson's Law: Work expands to take the time allowed
- Danger of feature and scope creep
- Beware of double-padding: Team member + manager
30
What are some issues with under estimations?
- Quality issues (short changing key phases like testing)
- Inability to meet deadlines
- Morale and other team motivation issues (DEATH MARCH)
31
Describe estimation for agile development
- Each user scenario is considered separately
- Each task is estimated separately
- Total scenario estimate is computed *sum estimate for each task"
- THe effort estimates for all scenarios in the increment are summered to get an increment estimate
32
What are some estimation guidelines?
- Estimate iteratively! Process of gradual refinement, make your best estimates at each planning stage, refine estimates and adjust plans iteratively, plans and decisions can be refined in response. Balance: too many revisions vs too few.
33
Estimation presentation techniques
- Plus or minus quantifiers (e.g., 6 months +/- 1 month
- Ranges: 6-8 months
- Risk quantification
- +/- with added information
- +1 month if new tools not working as expeted
- Cases: Best/Planned/Current/Worst case
- Course Dates: Q3 02
- Confidence Factor (April 1 - 10% probability, July 1 - 50%, etc_
34
What are some "other" estimation factors"
- Account for resource experience or skill, allow for "non-project" time & common tasks, use commercial estimation tools
35
What is software quality
Meet the the explicit and implicit requirements - the needs.
36
What is the purpose of software testing?
Asses and evaluate the quality of work performed at each stage of softwre development process. Goal is to ensure software performs as intended to ti improve software quality, reliability, and maintainability
Testing is a measure of quality, it does not deliver quality
37
Goals of quality assurance (QA) acitivites?
- Few, if any, defects remain in the system when its delivered
- Remaining defects will cause minimal distriptions or damages
38
Verification
Are we building the product right, should conform to its design
39
Validation
Are we building the right product, validate the implementation. Software should do wha the user really requires.
Validation and Verification: Build the right product and built it right.
40
QA technique classification:
- Defect prevention (remove human error sources, block defects from being injected into software artificats)
- Defect reduction
+ Detect defects (Inspection, Testing)
+ Remove defects (Debugging, Rework requireiments, design, code, etc)
- Defect containment
+ Fault tolerance
+ Fault containment
41
What is the sweet spot of testing?
The number of defects intersects the cost of testing.
42
What is measure?
Provides a quantitative indication of the size of some product or process attribute
43
What is measurement?
The act of obtaining a measure
44
What is a software metric?
Any type of measurement which relates to a software system, process, or related documentation. LOC in a program, number of person-days required to develop a compnent
- Allow the software and the software process to be quantified
- Measures of the software process or product
45
What are the metric categories?
Product - Accesses the quality of the design and construction of the software product being built
Process & Project - Quantitative measures that enable software engineers to gain insight into the efficiency of the software process and the projects conducted using the process framework
46
What are some process metrics?
Private process metrics: defect rates by individual or module only known to the individual or team concerned
Public process metrics enable organizations to make strategic changes to improve software process
Metrics should not be used to evaluate the performance of individuals
- Statistical software process imporvement helps and organizatin to discover where tehy are strong and where they are weak
47
What are some classes of product metrics?
Should be a predictor of product quality
Classes:
- Dynamic metrics which are collected by measurements made of a program in execution
- Static metrics collected by measurements made of the system representations
- Dynamic metrics help assess efficiency and reliability; Static metrics help assess complexitiy; understandability, and maintainability
48
What should every project measure
Inputs, Outputs, and the results
49
What are project metrics used for?
Avoid development schedule delays, mitigate potential risks, and to access product quality on an on-going basis
50
What are some direct measures?
Process: Cost and effort
Product: LOC, execution speed, memory size, defects reported over some time period
51
What are some indirect measures?
Examines the quality of the software product itself (functionality, complexity, efficiency, reliability, maintainability)
52
What are size-oriented metrics?
Derived by normalizing (dividing) any direct measure (such as defects or human effort) associated with the product or project by LOC)
Size-oriented metrics are widely used but their validity and applicability is a matter of some debate
53
What are function-oriented metrics?
- They are computed from direct measures of the information domain of a business software application and assessment of its complexity.
- Once computed, function points are used like LOC to normalize measures of software productivity, quality, and other attributes
- Relationship of LOC and function points depends on the language used to implement the software
54
What are some metric assumptions?
A software property can be measured
The relationship exists between what we can measure and what we want to know
This relationship hsa been formalized and validated
It may be difficult to relate what can be measured to desirable quality attributes
55
What are some internal and external attributes metrics?
Maintainability: Number of procedure parameters, Cyclometric complexity, length of user manual
Reliability: Cyclometric complexity, LOC, number of error messages
Portability: Number of procedure parameters, LOC
Usability: Number of error messages, Length of user manual
56
What are three types of automatic data collection?
- Static product analysis
- Dynamic product analysis
- Process data collection
57
What are software product metrics?
Fan in/Fan out (Fan-in is a measure of the number of functions that call other functions. Fan-out is the number of functions which are called by function X; high value for fan-in means that X is tightly coupled to the rest of the design and changes to X will have extensive knockback effects. A high value for fan-out suggests that the overall complexity of X may be high because of the complexity of the control logic needed to coordinate the called components)
- Length of Code (Large => More complex + error prone)
- Cyclomatic Complexity (Measure of control complexity of a program. Can be related to program understandability)
- Length of identifier (the longer the more likely they will be meaningful)
- Depth of conditional nesting (Measure the depth of nesting of if-statements in a program. Deeplynested if statements are hard to understand and are potentially error-prone)
- Fog Index (This measure of the average length of words and sentences in documents. The higher value for the fog index, the more difficulty the doc may be to understand)
58
What are some object oriented metrics?
- Depth of inheritance tree
- Method fan-in/fan-out
- Weighted methods per class
- Number of overriding operations
59
What are some of the top ten metrics (usage)?
- Number of defects found after a release
- Number of changes or change requests
- User or customer satisfaction
- Number of defects found during development
- Documentation completeness/ accuracy
- Time to identify/ correct defects
- Defect distribution by type/class
- Error by major function/ feature
- Test coverage by specifications
- Test coverage of code
60
What are the software change strategies?
- Software maintenance: Changes are made in response to changed requirements but the fundamental software structure is stable
- Architecture transformation: The architecture of the system is modified generally from a centralized architecture to a distributed architecture
- Software re-engineering: No new functionality is added to the system but it is restructured and reorganized to facilitate future changes
61
What are the Lehman's Laws?
Continuing Change: A program that is used in real-world environment must change or become progressively less useful in that environment
Increasing complexity: As an evolving program changes, its structure tends to become more complex. Extra resources must be devoted to preserving and simplifying the structure
Large program evolution: Program evolution is a self-regulating process. System attributes such as size, time between releases, and the number of reported errors are approximately invariant for each system release
Organizational stability: Over a program's lifetime, its rate of development is approximately constant and independent of the resources devoted to a system development
Conservation of familiarity: Over the lifetime of a system, the incremental change in each release is approximately constant
62
What is software maintenance?
- Modifying a program after it has been put into use.
- Maintenance does not normally involve major changes to the system's architecture
- Changes are implemented by modifying existing components and adding new components to the system
63
Maintenance is inevitable!
- System requirements are likely to change while the system is being developed because the environment is changing = delivered system won't meet its requirements
- Systems are tightly coupled with their environment => when a system is installed in an environment it changes that environment and therefore changes the system requirements
- Systems MUST be maintained if they are to remain useful in an environment
64
What are the types of maintenance?
- Maintenance to repair software faults (changing a system to correct deficiencies in the way meets its requirements - corrective maintenance)
- Maintenance to adapt software to a different operating environment (adaptive maintenance)
- Maintenance to add or to modify the system's functionality (e.g., satisfy new requirements - Perfective Maintenance)
65
Describe the maintenance costs!
- Usually greater than development costs (2* to 100* depending on application)
- Affected by both technical and non-technical factors
- Increases as software is maintained. Maintenance corrupts the software structure so makes further maintenance more difficult
- Ageing software can have high support costs (old languages, compilers, etc)
66
What are some maintenance cost factors?
- Team stability (maintenance costs are reduced if the same staff are involved with them for some time)
- Contractual responsibility (developers of a system may have no contractual responsibility for maintenance so there is no incentive to design for future change)
- Staff skills (maintenance staff are often inexperienced and have limited domain knowledge)
- Program age and structure ( as program age, their structure is degraded and they become harder to understand and change)
67
What is maintenance prediction?
Concerned with assessing which parts of the system may cause problems and have high maintenance costs.
- Change acceptance depends on the maintainability of the components affected by the change
- Implementing change degrades the system and reduces its maintainability
- Maintenance costs depend on the number of changes and costs of change depends on maintainability
68
Factors influencing relationship between system and its environment
- Number and complexity of system interfaces
- Number of inherently volatile system requirements
- Business processes where the system is used
69
What does complexity depend on (metrics)?
- Complexity of control structures
- Complexity of data structures
- Procedure and module size
70
What are some process metrics to assess maintainability?
- The number of requests for corrective maintenance
- Average time required for impact analysis
- Average time taken to implement a change request
- Number of outstanding change requests
=> IF ANY OR ALL OF THE ABOVE is increasing, this may indicate a decline in maintainability
71
What are some defect methodologies?
- Defect Counts
- Defect Density Prediction
- Defect Pooling
- Defect Seeding
- Defect Modeling
72
Defects Fixed vs. Open Sweet Spot
Defects are being fixed faster than being found
73
What is defect count?
- Ratio of new defects to defects solved
| - Statistics on effort per defect
74
What is defect density prediction?
- Compare to historical data (similar projects, similar or same team)
- Use pooling, seeding, and modeling
75
What is defect pooling?
Prediction technique that separates defects found into two pools (e.g., which team, when found, etc arbitrary)
Defectsunique = DefectsA + DefectsB - DefectsAB
- The number of total defects can then be approximated by Defects Total = (DefectsA * defectsB )/ DefectsAB
76
What is defect seeding?
Defects are intentionally inserted into the project and how many found are measured for prediction
IndigenousDefectsTotal = (SeededDefectsPlanted/ SeededDefectsFound) * IndigenousDefectsFound
77
What is defect modeling?
Use previous data to build predictive model
- The speed to which you find defects shoiuld be consistent with historical data
- Don't assume no defects found means you are ready for release (testing methodology may be flawed, testing and reporting systems may be biased)
78
What are the CMM Levels?
- Initial (essentially uncontrolled)
No focus, and the project success primary depends on individuals and their heroics
- Repeatable (Product management procedures defined and used)
Focus is on project management. The basic project management processes are established to track cost, schedules, and functionality. The necessary process discipline is in place to repeat earlier successes on projects with similar applications.
- Defined (Process management procedures and strategies defined and used)
Focus is on the engineering process>
The software process for both management and engineering activities is documented, standardized, and integrated into a standard software process for the organization. All projects uses an approved, tailored version of the organization's standard software process for dev and maintaining software.
- Managed (quality management strategies defined and used)
The focus is on product and process quality;
Detailed measures of the software process and product quality are collected. Both the software process and products are quantitatively understood and controlled.
- Optimizing (Process improvement strategies defined and used)
Focus is on continuous process improvement. This is enabled by quantitative feedback rom process and from piloting innovative ideas and technologies.
79
Describe the essence of CMM
CMM is the capability maturity model and describes the principles and practices underlying software process maturity. Intended to help software organizations improve the matuirty of their softwre processes in terms of an evolutionary path from ad hoc, chaotic processes to mature, disciplined softwre processes
The ultimate goal is to improve software development and maintenance in the area of cost, schedule, and quality
80
What does CMM not do?
Not a silver bullet; does not address expertise in a particular application domains, advocate specific software technologies, suggest how to select, hire, motiviate, and retain competent people.
