Not so trivial pursuit - Software engineering edition

Hello readers. Today, I present to you 5 quickie questions for budding software engineers to chew on. Some of these are more specific to my development experiences so I don't expect you to know the answers, but you are reading this on the internet after all, so feel free to embrace the power of infinite shared knowledge.

1. Subversion is a version control system. Name another and briefly describe how it differs from Subversion. (Hint: Linus Torvalds insists you don't use Subversion)

RCS: Doesn't allow for concurrent changes, each developer must obtain a lock to edit a file. Developers must access the same file system to access files.

CVS: Versions are file-based as opposed to repository-wide. Back-end repository is composed of files rather than a database.

Git: Every developer has their own local copy of the whole repository. Rather than managing commit access, you choose other developers' repositories to merge with your own.

2. Briefly describe the difference between exhaustive and practical testing. Which test would you choose? (Answer correctness is based on your justification of your choice, rather than the choice itself)

Exhaustive testing can be more thorough and thus come closer to proving the correctness of a program where as practical testing tries to uncover errors by testing samples. Exhaustive testing, if possible to execute, can produce more reliable results. However, in most non-trivial programs, exhaustive testing is near-impossible if not impossible and thus impractical.

3. Name two ways that a robot can be scanned other than explicitly saying calling the scan() method.

Here are three other ways: 1) When your robot turns, assuming its gun and radar are not set to turn independently. 2) When your robot's gun turns, assuming its radar is not set to turn independently. 3) When your robot's radar turns.

4. When defining an equality relation, name at least two properties that must be upheld.

Here are four: 1) An object must equal itself. 2) An object must never equal null. 3) If two objects are equal, then their hash codes must be the same as well. 4) If object A equals B, and B equals C, then A must also equal C.

5. Given the following Ant code, what would you expect to happen? The default target is bubbles.


Ant prints out everything nice, then spice and finally sugar.