Quiz 1 - Result Summary

The results of the written quiz conducted in week 8 is summarised below. Overall average is 65.72 To : IT1573-01 and IT1573-02 : Well done !! As your class average is above the overall average. Please continue to keep up the good work. To : IT1573-03 and IT1573-04 : Please work harder and I hope you all can do better in the next quiz. Your tutors will return the scripts to you when term starts and we will go through all the questions again.

The next quiz (10%) will be during week 14 on UML and Requirement Management.

Week 9 (starting 10 Dec 2007) - the next posting will be in Jan 2008

We had spent the last 2 weeks to learn about basic UML. UML stands for Unified Modelling Language. It is used internationally to construct software model. Current version is UML2.0. Diagrams are better than Text. Using appropriate software models for the development will:

• facilitate better communication and understanding
• validate correctness against the requirements
• establish a blue-print of the software solution

In this module, we will only focus on how to construct simple class diagrams using basic notations such as:

• Classes with class names, attributes and operations
• Association with details of rolenames, multiplicity
• Generalization

We will learn the Use Case Diagrams and Interaction Diagrams (or known as Sequence Diagrams) when we study Requirement Management and Analysis after the term break.

Consider the following example, a class diagram showing the information of:

• 3 classes : BankAccount, AccountHolder, CashAccount and CreditCardAccount
• Each class is described with its own attributes and operations
• BankAccount is given a role-name of "Saving Account"
• Details of the multiplicity is : ONE BanckAccount belongs to ONE AccountHolder, ONE AccountHolder can only create ONE BankAccount (or Saving Account)
• 3 classes (BankAccount, CreditCardAccount, CashAccount) are related using Generalization which means "is-a-kind-of"

Do the following exercise: Identify three domain classes about the different kind of boats described. Use Unified Modelling Language (UML) to illustrate the details and the relationships among them.

“In general, all boats kept in the inventory can be described by its registration number, the manufacturer and the year of purchase. However, there are 2 special types of boats that need additional information to be stored in the database. These include the power boats which have to be identified by the number of engines and the fuel type. For sail boats, the number of sails have to be recorded.”

Week 7 (starting 26 Nov 2007)

In the last 2 weeks, we have looked into Software Qaulity Assurance (SQA) and Quality Control (QC). The common objective for both are the same - to identify defects as early as possible. However, the 2 are different in focus as highlighted below.

We have also mentioned that we will be focusing on 3 QC activities:

1. Review (we had done a simple review exercise during practical last week)
2. Testing (we focus on Black Box Testing Techniques : Equivalence Partitioning and Boundary Value Analysis)
3. Change Control (we have listed out the steps for a simple Change Control procedure)

The diagram below shows the steps of Change Control.

With that, we have concluded part I of this module (i.e. the general concepts of Software Engineering Practices).

In the next 2 weeks, we will look into Software Modelling using Unified Modelling Language (UML).