Ics 2302: Software Engineering 2012/2013 Question Paper
Ics 2302: Software Engineering 2012/2013
Course:Software Engineering
Institution: Meru University Of Science And Technology question papers
Exam Year:2012
University Examinations 2012/2013
FOURTH YEAR, FIRST SEMESTER EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR
OF SCIENCE IN MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE
AND
FOURTH YEAR, FIRST SEMESTER EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR
OF BUSINESS INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
AND
THIRD YEAR, SECOND SEMESTER EXAMINATION FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR
OF SCIENCE IN COMPUTER SCIENCE
ICS 2302: SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
DATE: AUGUST 2013 TIME: 2 HOURS
INSTRUCTIONS: Answer question one and any other two questions
QUESTION ONE – 30 MARKS
a. What is software engineering and how does it differ from computer science? (5 Marks)
b. With suitable examples, explain the meaning of functional requirements. (5 Marks)
c. Give any five characteristics of object oriented design. (5 Marks)
d. What is software evolution and why is it inevitable? (5 Marks)
e. Briefly explain the meaning and purpose of program inspections. (5 Marks)
f. Pricing-to-win is one of the most popular estimation techniques. Despite its popularity, pricing-to-win
has a number of advantages and disadvantages. Discuss. (5 Marks)
2
QUESTION TWO – 20 MARKS
a. It has been argued that the software crisis led to the birth of the software engineering discipline in the
late 1960s. What do you understand by the term software crisis? (5 Marks)
b. There are still many software experts who are of the opinion that the software crisis is not over yet.
Do you concur with this opinion? Discuss. (5 Marks)
c. With suitable examples, distinguish between software processes and software process models.
(5 Marks)
d. A university clerk needs to check the number of foreign students in the university. All university
students are registered in a three tier web based database. This means that the clerk has to type his
search request at the html form, then click submit button. The submit click event forwards the request
to a middle level application (e.g JavaServlet), which in turn forwards the request to a database. The
database sends a reply back to the middle level application, which in turn forwards the reply back to
the clerk. Represent this interaction using a state transition diagram. (5 Marks)
QUESTION THREE – 20 MARKS
a. Distinguish between the following: (4 Marks)
i. User requirements and system requirements (4 Marks)
ii. Domain requirements and non-functional requirements. (4 Marks)
b. You recently went to interview some administrative staff in an effort to extract requirements on how
they want the oncoming university website to look like. One staff member gave a requirement that
“we want the homepage of our website to be nicely done”. Identify some of the problems with this
user requirement? (6 Marks)
c. Describe some of the challenges you are likely to encounter when eliciting domain requirements in the
medical profession. (6 Marks)
QUESTION FOUR – 20 MARKS
a. Briefly describe the object oriented design process. (5 Marks)
b. Part of your responsibility as the software project manager is to oversee staff recruitment. In recent
weeks, a number of staff has been resigning from your organization. What do you think are some of
the reasons why they are resigning? (5 Marks)
c. Assuming that four of your eight programmers have resigned in the last one month, what remedial
steps would you take to ensure that the gap left by these resignations would not affect your schedule
for the current project? (5 Marks)
d. It has been argued that before you start designing classes, interfaces etc, you should first design the
system architecture. Why is it important to settle the matter of the system architecture before delving
into other types of design? (5 Marks)
3
QUESTION FIVE – 20 MARKS
a. What is the meaning of automated static code analysis and how does it help in improving software
quality? (6 Marks)
b. What are some of the limitations of Lehman’s laws of evolution? (4 Marks)
c. There is evidence that maintenance costs for software can range anywhere between two times (2*) to
one hundred times (100*) the cost of software development. Explain why this is so. (5 Marks)
d. Given the following search form for a library system, develop a use-case diagram to illustrate how
users will be interacting with the form. (5 Marks)
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