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Bmit 417:Software Engineering March 2010 Question Paper

Bmit 417:Software Engineering March 2010 

Course:Bachelor Of Business Management And Information Technology

Institution: Kabarak University question papers

Exam Year:2010



KABARAK UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS
2009/2010 ACADEMIC YEAR
FOR THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
& INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
COURSE CODE: BMIT 417


INSTRUCTIONS:
 Answer questions ONE and any other TWO.
QUESTION ONE (40 MARKS)
a) Explain what necessitates change of an information system in an organization. (6 Marks)
b) Differentiate between the following set of terms in software engineering.
i. Bottom-up testing and top-down testing. (2 Marks)
ii. Goals, Requirements and constraints. (3 Marks)
c) Explain the three basic principles that waterfall processes are characterized. (4 ½ Marks)
d) Explain any three primary purpose of having reviews or inspections in any project.
(4 ½ Marks)
e) List and explain briefly any four types of system testing. (2 Marks)
f) Describe what is meant by programming in the Large and Programming in the Small?
(4 Marks)
g) Describe the ‘code’ and ‘fix’ model and give its advantages. (4 Marks)
h) When designing a system you must ensure that the user experiences the power to
maintain control. Discuss the design principles that you will put in place. (5 Marks)
i) Explain why many software engineers do not prefer the traditional approach during
scheduling of a project. (5 Marks)



QUESTION TWO (30 MARKS)
a) State and explain the main activities of software production. (4 Marks)
b) Explain the criterion for classifying non-functional requirements. (5 Marks)
c) Describe the evolutionary model of software development. (4 Marks)
d) Study the PERT chart drawn below used in the process of developing a system.

Required:
i. Which tasks are on the critical path of the PERT chart above? (1 Mark)
ii. What is the slack time for tasks C, D and G? (1 Mark)
iii. The person working on task C tells the project manager he can not start work until
one day after the scheduled starting date. What impact would this have on the
completion date of the project? Why? (1 Mark)
iv. Task A will be delayed by 2 days because some equipment has arrived late. If the
project manager still wants to finish the project within the original time frame, he
will need to shorten time for one or more of the tasks. What steps can he take to
reduce the number of days allocated to a task? (2 Marks)
v. The project manager decides to reduce the time needed for tasks D and F by one
day each. How effective will this reduction be in achieving his aim of maintaining
the original finish time for the project? (2 Marks)
e) What is the effect of designing a prototype on the overall cost of the software project?
(5 Marks)
f) What is maintainability? What is its role during maintenance? (5 Marks)


QUESTION THREE (30 MARKS)
a) Explain why maintenance is termed as an ongoing process? (6 Marks)
b) List and explain four problems of software development process model. (4 Marks)
c) Describe any four factors that affect software re-engineering process. (6 Marks)
d) Describe the factors considered in selecting the software development model, when
developing software. (4 Marks)
e) Why is testing conducted in all software? (5 Marks)
f) Describe the ultimate purpose of software reengineering. (5 Marks)


QUESTION FOUR (30 MARKS)
a) Consider a hospital:
Patients are treated in a single ward by the doctors assigned to them. Usually each patient
will be assigned a single doctor, but in rare cases they will have two. Healthcare
assistants also attend to the patients; a number of these are associated with each ward.
Initially the system will be concerned solely with drug treatment. Each patient is required
to take a variety of drugs a certain number of times per day and for varying lengths of
time.
The system must record details concerning patient treatment and staff payment. Some
staff are paid part time and doctors and healthcare assistants work varying amount of
overtime at varying rates. The system also keeps track of what treatments are required for
which patients and when and it should be capable of calculating the cost of treatment per
week for each patient.

Required:
i. Define entities. (3 Marks)
ii. Define relationships. (3 Marks)
iii. Draw an Entity relationship diagram (ERD) (4 Marks)
b) Identifying project scope and objectives is one of the phases in project planning. Explain
what is done in this phase. (5 Marks)
c) Discuss how feasibility study is conducted in software development. (6 Marks)
d) Describe the metrics that influences the quality factor of software. (5 Marks)
e) What is the importance of breaking a system into subsystems? (4 Marks)



QUESTION FIVE (30 MARKS)
a) Describe the quantitative measures in software maintainability (4 Marks)
b) Define the following terms.
i. Software engineering. (1 Mark)
ii. Maintenance. (1 Mark)
iii. Feasibility study. (1 Mark)
iv. Project Planning. (1 Mark)
c) Explain how documentation can be conducted. (4 Marks)
d) Describe how the problem of unrealistic schedules can be resolved in project
management. (4 Marks)
e) What are the two main software quality assurance activities, and why are they conducted?
(4 Marks)
f) Describe the objectives of SQA in monitoring formal software testing. (5 Marks)
g) Why do software developers pay so much attention to the requirements phase of the
software development life cycle? (5 Marks)






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