1.  TravelTech Corp has provided you with a text statement of their user requirements for a project. The text statement reads as follows:

“TravelTech Corp are a major supplier of hotel and accommodation booking  services. We wish to develop a replacement for our existing bookings            management system, to enhance the range of search and booking options to support a wide range of desktop and mobile platforms.

Customers can browse the booking system on-line to find hotel and                      accommodation bookings that meets their needs based on location, arrival date,  duration of stay and number of guests. Location can be defined either by broad   geographical area (e.g. Tuscany) or by specific city (e.g. Pisa). It would be useful if customer could select areas by recent popularity. Customers can set upper and lower bound costs on a per night basis expressed in either pounds or euros. A     customer can create an account on the site and save their provisional bookings   for a minimum of 1 month and ideally a maximum of 3 months. If any underlying  prices change prior to confirming the booking, it would be helpful if the system     could notify the customer by email. The account can also then be used to confirm any provisional bookings, when payment is made via a secure payment system.

The system interface must offer all functionality across Mac/PC and Linux          platforms and must work on Explorer, Chrome and Safari browsers. Ideally the  interface would conform to ISO-IEC 40500 for accessibility.  The interface must work on both desktop and mobile devices (phone and tablet). Ideally there could be an Appstore version for both Apple iOS and Android.

The software will be built using Java within a Jakarta EE framework. As this is      business critical software, it must offer a mean time between failure of no less      than one in 10,000 hours, but closer to the one in 20,000 hours would be              preferred. Ideally the system should be 100% reliable as we have an excellent     industry reputation to maintain. The software should ideally incorporate analytics  so that senior management can remotely view how customers are interacting with system. The software should be easy to use, and a strategy needs to be               produced to enable the migration of existing booking data from the existing old     back end system to the new system on an agreed changeover date. The back      end data storage is currently provided by a SQL database system and we have    decided to move to a cloud based storage solution. ”

Working from this statement of user requirements:

a)  State two mandatory functional requirements and two desirable functional requirements.

[8 marks]

b)  State clearly two mandatory non-functional requirements and two desirable non-functional requirements.

[8 marks]

c)  Give an example of a domain requirement and explain what needs to be done with the domain requirement so that it can be acted upon.

[8 marks]

d)  Do you consider it reasonable for TravelTech to specify a 100% reliability      metric for their booking system? You must provide reason(s) and justification for your answer.

[8 marks]

e)  TravelTech have expressed a desire to move to a cloud based storage        solution for their back end data. This desire carries comes with risk. With     reference to this specific example, explain how a risk may be characterised, and suggest appropriate measures that the TravelTech team can adopt to   minimise this risk

[12 marks]

f)   Give an example what is meant by an “organisational/people” risk and suggest what steps may be adopted to mitigate against it.

[6 marks]

2.

a)  In the context of the Agile development process, explain what is meant by the following terms:

•   Agile manifesto.

•    User stories.

•    Sprint.

•    Pair wise programming.

[10 marks]

b)  A project is to be executed using a planned Waterfall development process. Using the information in the table below, assuming that the project team will work a standard working week (5 working days in 1 week) and that all tasks will start as soon as possible:

i.     Produce a PERT analysis of this project (showing the earliest and latest start and finish times) and determine the critical path of the project.

[10 marks]

ii.      Calculate the planned duration of the project in weeks.

[5 marks] iii.     Identify any non-critical tasks and the float (free slack) on each.

[5 marks]

c)  Explain what is meant by a “design pattern”, and how this idea helps us to       produce better software engineering solutions. You should include an example of one design or architectural design pattern in your answer, including an         explanation of where it might be used.

[10 marks]

d)  A key feature of Enterprise scale framework based solutions is the concept of container managed services. The Java Jakarta EE framework provides the    Java Persistence API (JPA) to support Object-Relational Mapping (ORM)       between Java objects and a relational database. Explain what is meant by     “container managed services” in the context of ORM as a means of providing persistent data storage, and explain clearly the advantages of such an           approach over a 3-tier architecture implemented using PHP and SQL.

[10 marks]