Exam 2 Review

Computer Science 340

Exam 2 Review

Disclaimer: I have attempted to be comprehensive in the following, but important items may have been omitted by mistake. If you see such an omission, please let me know, but you are responsible for all of the lecture material to date.

Second disclaimer: This is a draft and may be revised (somewhat) after Monday's class.

The second hour exam will be held on Thursday, Nov. 11, and will cover chapter 9 (formal specification) and chapters 12 - 17 (excluding chapter 16) of the textbook.

Requirements Specification
- As indicated in the first exam review, formal specification will be on this exam. Be prepared to
  - Translate specifications written in predicate logic into English
  - Draw or explain a simple finite state automaton for specification.
  - Draw or explain a basic dataflow diagram (this also could appear under design).
- You might want to work exercises 9.3 - 9.6 on pages 169 - 170 for practice in the use of logic in specifications. For practice with the use of a finite state automaton in requirements specification, consider the following applications:
  - Describe a floating point number
  - Describe a simple command language for blocksworld (with commands such as "pick up the red block and put it in the blue box"
  - Describe the states of an ATM
- Since I was not clever enough to think of assigning these problems early enough for you to turn in, I will provide (kind of) a solutions sheet for them Tuesday for your review.
Design
- Definitions. Be able to give definitions of object oriented design, functional design, cohesion (and varieties of cohesion), coupling, subsystem, module, repository model, client-server model, reference architecture, etc..
- Be able to describe the three phases of architectural design (including subtopics).
- Be able to describe the basics of object oriented design, of function-oriented design, and be able to do (part of) a design using these approaches (i.e., I may ask for a breakdown of a system into objects, but not ask for an object-use diagram, or ask for a data-flow diagram, something like that. To ask for a full design, even for a simple problem, would probably take up the entire exam.
- Be able to describe the basics of user-interface design. A good idea would be to look at some of the questions at the end of chapter 17.
Questions are likely to be primarily of an essay type, though there may be some design questions (asking you for some part of the design process), and there may also be some specific questions on requirements specification. We can spend some time Tuesday in review if that would be useful.