Software Development

Question 1

What are the different testing methods?

Answer 1

Black box, white box, alpha, beta and acceptance testing.

Question 2

What is black box testing?

Answer 2

Tests designed to check the program functions as expected, will include tests for in and out of bounds inputs if applicable.

Question 3

What is white box testing?

Answer 3

Tests designed to take each path through the program and check they function as expected.

Question 4

What is alpha testing?

Answer 4

Testing done by the developers.

Question 5

What is beta testing?

Answer 5

Testing carried out by potential users.

Question 6

What is acceptance testing?

Answer 6

Tests to ensure the program meets the initial criteria.

Question 7

Explain the waterfall life cycle model.

Answer 7

Each part of development is done in sequence, when it is required to go back a stage you must go through all the other stages again.

Question 8

Explain the spiral model.

Answer 8

Similar to the waterfall model but each step is done less vigorously as you go back after cycle of analysis, design, implementation, evaluation.

Question 9

What is agile development?

Answer 9

Where small quick to make changes to the product are made at each stage with lots of feedback from the client.

Question 10

What is extreme programming?

Answer 10

A form of agile development where there are frequent releases of the software.

Question 11

What is rapid action development (RAD)?

Answer 11

Software development where each section of the program has to be made within strict deadlines even if the resulting software isn’t as good.

Question 12

Compare each of the development methods.

Answer 12

Waterfall is good for small projects where careful supervision is needed and has the drawback of a lack of user input, spiral and agile are better as they keep getting user feedback regularly, XP and RAD are good for large projects where it is possible for there be too many suggested improvements so that the required program is always changing.

Question 13

What are the three main programming paradigms?

Answer 13

Procedural, object-oriented and functional declarative.

Question 14

What is procedural programming?

Answer 14

Where functions and procedures are used to split the program up into different sections. An example of a procedural language is python.

Question 15

What is object-oriented programming?

Answer 15

Where abstract objects like stacks or people are used so that code can easily be re-used and is much cleaner, OOP can be done in C#.

Question 16

What is declarative programming?

Answer 16

Used in languages like SQL, the programmer writes statements to describe the problem and the language implementation decides how to solve it.

Question 17

What is an object?

Answer 17

An instance of a class (similar to how a 5 is an instance of the an integer).

Question 18

What is a class?

Answer 18

A variable type which you design which is used to describe a certain thing in your program, this could be children in a school or squares in a geometry program.

Question 19

What is inheritance?

Answer 19

Inheritance is when a class has properties from a class above it, e.g. circles would inherit properties from the “shapes” class.

Question 20

What is polymorphism in OOP?

Answer 20

Where a method is re-defined in an inherited class.

Question 21

Advantages of OOP?

Answer 21

Requires more planning which shows issues earlier, code can be tested independently of the main program, once made a class can be used by any programmer without needing to understand how it works, new similar objects can be created by inheriting from others, can be re-used within a program, maintenance is easier and is good for making libraries.