Software Engineering is indeed a must-to-go field for every individual who aspires to make a successful career as a Software Engineer, Software Developer, etc. in the IT industry. In simple words, it is concerned with the systematic and comprehensive study of designing, development, operations, and maintenance of a software system. In tech interviews of almost every renowned tech company, recruiters asked various questions from Software Engineering concepts such as Software Development Models & Architecture, Software Project Management (SPM), Testing and Debugging, etc. to assess the candidates. Hence, you must be prepared for all such Software Engineering Interview Questions to ace the interview.
We know that Software Engineering is a vast field in itself and to find out & prepare for all the important concepts or questions for interviews is not an easy job. So, to make it easier and convenient for you, here, we’re providing you with an extensive list of Commonly Asked Software Engineering Interview Questions that are often asked by the recruiters. Do check out all these questions from below:
Software reengineering is the process of scanning, modifying, and reconfiguring a system in a new way. The principle of reengineering applied to the software development process is called software reengineering. It has a positive impact on software cost, quality, customer service, and shipping speed. Software reengineering improves software to create it more efficiently and effectively.
The activities of the software engineering process framework are complemented by a variety of higher-level activities. Umbrella activities typically apply to the entire software project and help the software team manage and control progress, quality, changes, and risks. Common top activities include Software Project Tracking and Control Risk Management, Software Quality Assurance Technical Review Measurement Software Configuration Management Reusability Management Work Product Preparation and Production, etc.
Cohesion indicates the relative functional capacity of the module. Aggregation modules need to interact less with other sections of other parts of the program to perform a single task. It can be said that only one coagulation module (ideally) needs to be run. Cohesion is a measurement of the functional strength of a module. A module with high cohesion and low coupling is functionally independent of other modules. Here, functional independence means that a cohesive module performs a single operation or function. The coupling means the overall association between the modules.
Coupling relies on the information delivered through the interface with the complexity of the interface between the modules in which the reference to the section or module was created. High coupling support Low coupling modules assume that there are virtually no other modules. It is exceptionally relevant when both modules exchange a lot of information. The level of coupling between two modules depends on the complexity of the interface.
The black box test (also known as the conducted test closed box test opaque box test) is centered around software useful prerequisites. In other words, it is possible to guess a set of information conditions that help the program through an attempt to discover and fulfill all the necessities perfectly. There is no choice of black-box testing white box procedures. Maybe it’s a complementary methodology, perhaps the white box method will reveal the errors of other classes.
White Box Testing is a method of analyzing the internal structure, data structures used, internal design, code structure, and behavior of software, as well as functions such as black-box testing. Also called glass-box test or clear box test or structural test.
The Feasibility Study in Software Engineering is a study to assess the adequacy of proposed projects and systems. A feasibility study is a measure of a software product on how product development can benefit an organization from a validity analysis or practical point of view. Feasibility studies are conducted for multiple purposes to analyze the correctness of a software product in terms of development, porting, the contribution of an organization’s projects, and so on.
For more details, please refer to the following article Types of Feasibility Study in Software Project Development article.
Software Reverse Engineering is a process of recovering the design, requirement specifications, and functions of a product from an analysis of its code. It builds a program database and generates information from this. The purpose of reverse engineering is to facilitate maintenance work by improving the understandability of a system and producing the necessary documents for a legacy system.
Software Requirement Specification (SRS) Format is a complete specification and description of requirements of the software that needs to be fulfilled for successful development of software system. These requirements can be functional as well as non-requirements depending upon the type of requirement. The interaction between different customers and contractors is done because it’s necessary to fully understand the needs of customers. For more details please refer software requirement specification format article.
15. What are the elements to be considered in the System Model Construction?The type and size of the software, the experience of use for reference to predecessors, difficulty level to obtain users’ needs, development techniques and tools, the situation of the development team, development risks, the software development methods should be kept in mind. It is an important prerequisite to ensure the success of software development that designing a reasonable and suitable software development plan.
CASE stands for Computer-Aided Software Engineering. CASE tools are a set of automated software application programs, which are used to support, accelerate and smoothen the SDLC activities.
For more details, please refer to the following article Software Engineering – Rapid Application Development Model (RAD).
A COCOMO model stands for Constructive Cost Model. As with all estimation models, it requires sizing information and accepts it in three forms:
20. Define an estimation of software development effort for organic software in the basic COCOMO model?
Estimation of software development effort for organic software in the basic COCOMO model is defined as
The agile SDLC model is a combination of iterative and incremental process models with a focus on process adaptability and customer satisfaction by rapid delivery of working software products. Agile Methods break the product into small incremental builds. Every iteration involves cross-functional teams working simultaneously on various areas like planning, requirements analysis, design, coding, unit testing, and acceptance testing.
22. Which model can be selected if the user is involved in all the phases of SDLC?
RAD model can be selected if the user is involved in all the phases of SDLC.
The highest abstraction level is called Level 0 of DFD. It is also called context-level DFD. It portrays the entire information system as one diagram.
Physical DFD focuses on how the system is implemented. The next diagram to draw after creating a logical DFD is physical DFD. It explains the best method to implement the business activities of the system. Moreover, it involves the physical implementation of devices and files required for the business processes. In other words, physical DFD contains the implantation-related details such as hardware, people, and other external components required to run the business processes.
A block hole concept in the data flow diagram can be defined as “A processing step may have input flows but no output flows”.In a black hole, data can only store inbound flows.
It is a process of software development that is done to improve the maintainability of a software system.
Estimation of the size of the software is an essential part of Software Project Management. It helps the project manager to further predict the effort and time which will be needed to build the project. Various measures are used in project size estimation. Some of these are:
Bug: An Error found in the development environment before the product is shipped to the customer. Error: Deviation for actual and the expected/theoretical value.
A use case diagram is a behavior diagram and visualizes the observable interactions between actors and the system under development. The diagram consists of the system, the related use cases, and actors and relates these to each other:
A Rayleigh model is used to check software reliability. The Rayleigh model is a parametric model in the sense that it is based on a specific statistical distribution. When the parameters of the statistical distribution are estimated based on the data from a software project, projections about the defect rate of the project can be made based on the model.
To determine an organization’s current state of process maturity, the SEI uses an assessment that results in a five-point grading scheme. The grading scheme determines compliance with a capability maturity model (CMM) that defines key activities required at different levels of process maturity. The SEI approach provides a measure of the global effectiveness of a company’s software engineering practices and establishes five process maturity levels that are defined in the following manner:
Adaptive maintenance defines as modifications and updations when the customers need the product to run on new platforms, on new operating systems, or when they need the product to interface with new hardware and software.
37. In the context of modular software design, which of the combination is considered for cohesion and coupling?
Regression testing is defined as a type of software testing that is used to confirm that recent changes to the program or code have not adversely affected existing functionality. Regression testing is just a selection of all or part of the test cases that have been run. These test cases are rerun to ensure that the existing functions work correctly. This test is performed to ensure that new code changes do not have side effects on existing functions. Ensures that after the last code changes are completed, the above code is still valid.
With increased expectations for software component quality and the complexity of components, software developers are expected to perform effective testing. In today’s scenario, mutation testing has been used as a fault injection technique to measure test adequacy. Mutation Testing adopts “fault simulation mode”.
Function point metrics provide a standardized method for measuring the various functions of a software application. Function point metrics, measure functionality from the user’s point of view, that is, on the basis of what the user requests and receives in return.
A baseline is a measurement that defines the completeness of a phase. After all activities associated with a particular phase are accomplished, the phase is complete and acts as a baseline for next phase.
43. What is the cyclomatic complexity of a module that has 17 edges and 13 nodes?
The cyclomatic complexity of a module that has seventeen edges and thirteen nodes = E – N + 2
44. A software does not wear out in the traditional sense of the term, but the software does tend to deteriorate as it evolves, why?
The software does not wear out in the traditional sense of the term, but the software does tend to deteriorate as it evolves because Multiple change requests introduce errors in component interactions.
Cohesion refers to the degree to which Cohesion the elements inside a module belong together. is an extension of the information hiding concept.
The full form of WBS is Work Breakdown Structure. Its Work Breakdown Structure includes dividing a large and complex project into simpler, manageable, and independent tasks. For constructing a work breakdown structure, each node is recursively decomposed into smaller sub-activities, until at the leaf level, the activities become undividable and independent. A WBS works on a top-down approach. For more detail please refer Work breakdown structure article.
Paging is a method or technique which is used for non-contiguous memory allocation. It is a fixed-size partitioning theme (scheme). In paging, both main memory and secondary memory are divided into equal fixed-size partitions. The partitions of the secondary memory area unit and the main memory area unit are known as pages and frames respectively.
The best paging size varies from system to system, so there is no single best when it comes to page size. There are different factors to consider in order to come up with a suitable page size, such as page table, paging time, and its effect on the overall efficiency of the operating system.
Swapping is a simple memory/process management technique used by the operating system(os) to increase the utilization of the processor by moving some blocked processes from the main memory to the secondary memory thus forming a queue of the temporarily suspended processes and the execution continues with the newly arrived process. During regular intervals that are set by the operating system, processes can be copied from the main memory to a backing store, and then copied back later. Swapping allows more processes to be run that can fit into memory at one time
The interrupts are a signal emitted by hardware or software when a process or an event needs immediate attention. It alerts the processor to a high-priority process requiring interruption of the current working process. In I/O devices one of the bus control lines is dedicated for this purpose and is called the Interrupt Service Routine (ISR).
Rotational Latency: Rotational Latency is the time taken by the desired sector of the disk to rotate into a position so that it can access the read/write heads. So the disk scheduling algorithm that gives minimum rotational latency is better.
Apache ANT is a Java based build tool from Apache Software Foundation. Apache ANT’s build files are written in XML and they take advantage of being open standard, portable and easy to understand. This tutorial will teach you how to use Apache ANT to automate the build and deployment process in simple and easy steps. After completing this tutorial, you will find yourself at a moderate level of expertise in using Apache ANT from where, you can take yourself to next levels.
White Box Testing is a method of analyzing the internal structure, data structures used, internal design, code structure, and behavior of software, as well as functions such as black-box testing. Also called glass-box test or clear box test or structural test.
A COCOMO model stands for Constructive Cost Model. As with all estimation models, it requires sizing information and accepts it in three forms:
15. What are the elements to be considered in the System Model Construction?The type and size of the software, the experience of use for reference to predecessors, difficulty level to obtain users’ needs, development techniques and tools, the situation of the development team, development risks, the software development methods should be kept in mind. It is an important prerequisite to ensure the success of software development that designing a reasonable and suitable software development plan.
A baseline is a measurement that defines the completeness of a phase. After all activities associated with a particular phase are accomplished, the phase is complete and acts as a baseline for next phase.
37. In the context of modular software design, which of the combination is considered for cohesion and coupling?