Software Development Lifecycle

Question 1

What is the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)?

Answer 1

The SDLC represents the development of software as a set of phases or activities.

Question 2

What stage of the SDLC is described as “figuring out what problem the system is addressing”?

Answer 2

Requirements Analysis Phase

Question 3

What stage of the SDLC is described as “finding out and obtaining the relevant hardware, software and network requirements”?

Answer 3

Design Phase

Question 4

What stage of the SDLC is described as “making any modifications if necessary”?

Answer 4

Evolution Phase

Question 5

What stage of the SDLC is described as “assessing the software thoroughly and fixing any detected bugs”?

Answer 5

Testing Phase

Question 6

What stage of the SDLC is described as “installing the system to support the intended business functions”?

Answer 6

Implementation Phase

Question 7

What is the “Waterfall approach”?

Answer 7

The “waterfall” approach breaks the SDLC into distinct, sequential phases, which needs managerial sign-off before moving onto the next.

Question 8

What is the difference between a project and a program?

Answer 8

A project is a chunk of work to be done, while a program may be a collection of separate projects.

Question 9

What are some examples of factors that go into reducing the risk of a project?

Answer 9

Experience, difficulty to implement, size and type of the project, number and independence of components, available resources, clarity of client requirements and the staging of deliverables are all factors that go into reducing the risk/increasing the chance of success of a project.

Question 10

What is the “Incremental/Divide and Conquer approach”?

Answer 10

An incremental model develops different versions of a program, developing it further and further until the project is in a deliverable state.

Question 11

What is the “Iterative/Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach”?

Answer 11

The RAD approach is where we rework and “evolve” existing components until the project can be “closed”, or delivered.

Question 12

What is the “V-Model Development Lifecycle”?

Answer 12

The V-Model is a way of representing a project as almost like a “V”, where each phase on the “left” has a corresponding phase on the “right”.

Typically, this means that each development phase will have a corresponding testing phase.

Question 13

What is meant by “Agile” development?

Answer 13

Agile is a method based on short, iterative “sprints”, where we incrementally develop, but iterate after a QA testing phase.

These “sprints” may be short, long, or even dynamic based on the project being made.

Question 14

What is meant by “Scrum” development?

Answer 14

Scrum is a method based on Agile where each sprint is fixed-length, typically around 2-4 weeks long, where we aim to produce a piece of working, functional software within that deadline.

Question 15

What is meant by “Paired Programming”?

Answer 15

Paired Programming is a method where two programmers will work on the same task, with one person acting as the “driver”, while the other acts as the “observer”.

The observer sits back and keeps an eye out for potentially harmful or lazy practices that could be an issue later in development.

Question 16

What are the three phases of Scrum programming?

Hint: One at either end, one frequently

Answer 16

Sprint plan meetings, which happen at the start of a sprint, to plan the tasks that need to be completed.

Daily scrim meetings, where programmers summarise the previous/coming day’s work.

Sprint review meetings, which happen at the end of a sprint, to demonstrate and analyse the completed software.

Question 17

What is meant by “version control”?

Answer 17

Version control allows you to record changes over time in the form of versions, and allows you to recall specific “versions” later.

Question 18

How does version control help out a development team?

Answer 18

Version control acts as a sort of project-wide time machine that can both examine how a project looked at certain points and rollback certain versions if new changes are undesirable or buggy.

Question 19

What should we NOT store in version control?

Answer 19

Anything that is sensitive or secret. For example, API keys, automatically generated documents (like Javadoc), or encryption secrets.

Question 20

What is the difference between a centralised and a distributed repository?

Answer 20

A centralised repository is one where there exists only one master repository, and all workstations connect directly to only this one repository.

A distributed repository, instead, is one where each repository has multiple sub-repositories.

Question 21

In what order do we commit and push data to a remote version control repository?

Answer 21

We first commit, which saves the updates along with a log name and description.

Then, we push, which updates the remote repository with this new commit.

Question 22

What is a pull request in version control?

Answer 22

A pull request is made when a developer requests to merge the changes made in one branch to another.

Question 23

How does the repository store which iteration the data is in?

Answer 23

The copies of the data have file-specific numbering - e.g. version 13 of MyObject.java.

The repositories store revision specific numbering instead - e.g. MyObject.java at revision 5.

Question 24

What is a revision tag?

Answer 24

A revision tag is a way to provide text for particularly important revisions.

e.g. “Fixed Connection.java”

Question 25

What is the trunk of a repository?

Answer 25

The main codebase that developers are working on is called the trunk.

Question 26

What is a branch of a repository?

Answer 26

A branch is a separate sub-repository, which, at runtime, contains a copy of the main repository, and has its own history and changes tracking.

Question 27

What is meant by forking a repository?

Answer 27

A fork is a completely separate branch of development stored as an entirely separate repository, managed by a different development team.

Question 28

What is meant by merging to a repository?

Answer 28

A merge is the ability to merge changes made in branches to the main trunk.

Question 29

What is meant by locking in a repository?

Answer 29

Locking is a solution for a situation where two or more people try and change the same file at the same time.

Question 30

What is strict locking in a repository?

Answer 30

Strict locking states that only one person can change a file at any one time.

Question 31

What is optimistic locking in a repository?

Answer 31

Optimistic locking states that all files may be changed, but if the repository has changed since your last checkout, the local copy needs to be updated before you can commit the change.