Answers to the Certified Software Quality Engineering Quiz for September 2009  

1. Answer A is correct.   Contracts are agreements that are legally binding. To be legally binding, the promises made in the contract must be exchanged for appropriate consideration. In other words, there has to be something of value received by both parties. If a legal contract is breached, the parties to the contract can seek legal remedies. Reference: The Certified Software Quality Engineering Handbook by Linda Westfall – page 12.  CSQE Body of Knowledge Area: I.B.2

2. Answer D is correct.  Audit evaluation criteria (requirements against which conformance and/or compliance is evaluated) provide the objective requirements and guidelines against which conformance and/or compliance is evaluated.   While quality records are used as objective evidence to evaluate compliance and/or conformance, they are never the requirements that an audit evaluation is performed against. Reference: The Certified Software Quality Engineering Handbook by Linda Westfall – pages 119-120.  CSQE Body of Knowledge Area: II.C.3

3. Answer B is correct.   The customers fund the software development effort or acquire the software products in order to meet their business objectives.  The requirements define the agreement between the customers and developers about the scope of the software product. The requirements define what is being built. The customer typically has final say and approval over what is included in the requirements and the requirement priorities. Reference: The Certified Software Quality Engineering Handbook by Linda Westfall – pages 182-183.  CSQE Body of Knowledge Area: III.D.1

4. Answer C is correct.  Phase gate reviews, also called phase-end, phase transition, or major milestone reviews, are event-driven reviews that are held at major milestones in the project. The purpose of these reviews is to act as a quality gate or checkpoint to ensure that all required activities have been completed satisfactorily and that all work products have achieved the quality levels required to move into the next major phase or activity of the project.  All activities on the critical path are critical activities (Answer A) and must be completed on time for the project to be completed on time.  The completion of a critical activity may or may not be a milestone.  Peer reviews (Answer B) are technical reviews of work products conducted by the peers of the author.  While the completion of a critical peer review or the last peer review in a chain of reviews might be designated as a milestone, the completion of an individual peer review is not typically designated as a project milestone.  The completion of an individual test case is also not typically designated as a project milestone.  Typically it is the completion of an entire testing cycle that is designated as a project milestone.  Reference: The Certified Software Quality Engineering Handbook by Linda Westfall – page 275.  CSQE Body of Knowledge Area: IV.A.3

5. Answer D is correct.  Test case defect density is a measure of the number of defects found in the test cases normalized by the size of the test cases.   Test case defect density could be used to measure the process capability of the system test design process (its ability to create defect free test cases).  However, if would not typically be used to measure the capability of the system test execution process. Reference: The Certified Software Quality Engineering Handbook by Linda Westfall – pages 330-331 and 351.  CSQE Body of Knowledge Area: V.B.2

6. Answer B is correct.  Boundary value analysis explores the values on or around the boundaries of the equivalence classes.  This is done by testing the minimum value (in this case 5 characters), the maximum value (in this case 25 characters), the value just below the minimum (in this case 4 characters),  and the value just above the maximum (in this case 26 characters). Reference: The Certified Software Quality Engineering Handbook by Linda Westfall – page 407.  CSQE Body of Knowledge Area: VI.B.3

7. Answer A is correct.  Depending on their sophistication, change management tools are used to:

- Request changes (for example, to request enhancements or to report problems or other anomalies), including documenting the associated information.

- Notify the appropriate individuals and disseminate information when a change is requested.

- Facilitate virtual change control board meetings and impact analysis reviews.

- Identify and track the statuses of change requests as they are worked to resolution, documenting each step in the change process. 

- Notify the appropriate individuals of status changes to each change request. For example, a development lead might be notified when one or more work products have been updated to incorporate the change and are ready for approval, or a tester might be notified when the change is ready for testing.

        Reference: The Certified Software Quality Engineering Handbook by Linda Westfall – page 488.  CSQE Body of Knowledge Area: VII.A.2

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