Sample Questions

The following is not intended to be a complete list,
but rather serves to highlight the more important points covered in the course,
and to illustrate the types of questions that you are likely to see on the final exam.
    1. What is the "software crisis"?
    2. Why worry about the quality of the development process? Why not just worry about the quality of the development personnel?
    3. Define "Software Quality".
    4. Define "Software Quality Assurance".
    5. List several typical causes of software faults.
    6. List several factors that affect software quality.
    7. Are those quality factors measurable?
    8. What do we need to look for when reviewing a software development contract?
    9. What are kinds of things go in a software development contract versus the system requirements specification?
    10. What are these things: ISO 9000, ISO 9001, ISO 9000-3?
    11. Life Cycles
    12. Who attends a peer review and what are their roles?
    13. Who attends a formal technical review and what is the usual purpose of such a meeting?
    14. Inspection Guidelines!!!
    15. What is the objective of a "code walkthrough"? What is the objective of code testing?
    16. Laws of Testing!!!
    17. What the strengths and weaknesses of both blackbox and whitebox testing?
    18. How do you compute Cyclomatic Complexity?
    19. What is loop testing and how do you use it to build test cases?
    20. What is boundary value analysis and how do you use it to build test cases?
    21. What are the strengths and weaknesses of bottom-up and top-down integration testing?
    22. What goes in a "test plan"?
    23. Other than a Test Plan, what other test documentation do we need?
    24. What is in a work procedure?
    25. What is the value of having work procedures?
    26. What is a "template" or "DoD Data Item Description"?
    27. CMM and ISO 9001 mandate training. Why? Give several reasons.
    28. What types of training topics do you need to offer?
    29. How do you identify preventive actions?
    30. How do sift through the huge data sets associated with CAPA?
    31. What configuration items might appear in a repository?
    32. Why mandate the use of baselines?
    33. Features of good configuration management tools?
    34. If you were told to audit the configuration management process, what would you look for?
    35. What are the big purposes of project tracking (from a QA perspective)?
    36. What gets tracked?
    37. If everyone in the group that you manage makes status reports at a weekly group meeting and everyone uses a project tracking tool, is there anything else that you need to do to track progress?
    38. If you were told to audit the project tracking procedure, what would you look for?
    39. How do you make the financial decision of how much money to spend on SQA?
    40. Know the five CMM levels and their characteristics.
    41. Why does CMM not allow a company to skip levels?
    42. Scan the Key Process Areas for the five levels.