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Software Engineering

5 guides for this subject — how to prepare, what to practise, and how to know it has gone in.

A practice question

Choose an answer and it is marked, with the explanation. From Software Engineering Practice Questions: 10 Worked MCQs.

Question 11 mark

A team is building an online appointment system. Which requirement is most directly testable as written?

The cancellation requirement defines an observable action and a precise time boundary, so a test can check the outcome at and around 24 hours. The strongest distractor is 'respond quickly': it sounds measurable, but without a response-time target, workload and measurement point, it is ambiguous.

A spoken answer, marked

An examiner's question, answered out loud and marked criterion by criterion. From Software Engineering Viva Questions: A Practical Oral Guide.

Oral — Requirements under conflictMarked

Examiner

A hospital administration team asks for a new appointment system. Clinicians want flexible booking, while the finance team wants every change auditable. How would you elicit and prioritise the requirements?

2:363:00Mark answer
78%Requirements under conflict — marked78/100 · Sound with one important omission · 2:36 spoken of 3:00
Definitions and assumptions17/20

The answer identifies patients, clinicians and finance as different stakeholders and assumes that an appointment change must be attributable to a user.

ImproveState whether clinical safety or legal retention requirements impose non-negotiable constraints before discussing lower-priority features.

Trade-offs and constraints15/20

The response separates must-have booking behaviour from reporting preferences and proposes prioritising by risk, value and dependency.

ImproveExplain how a conflict would be resolved when clinician flexibility makes the audit trail harder to interpret.

Evidence from engineering practice16/20

It proposes interviews, observation, workflow mapping and acceptance criteria, then suggests validating a prototype with real users.

ImproveInclude an example acceptance criterion, such as recording who changed an appointment, when and from which previous state.

Clear, structured communication17/20

The response moves from discovery to prioritisation and validation in a clear sequence.

ImproveEnd with the first two delivery increments so the recommendation becomes an actionable plan.

A strong answerI would begin with interviews and observation of booking, rescheduling and cancellation, involving clinicians, administrative staff, finance and an information-governance representative. I would record functional requirements separately from constraints: a booking change must show the actor, time, previous value and new value, and the record must not be silently overwritten. I would prioritise safety, legal and audit requirements first, then the smallest booking workflow that can be tested with users. For flexible scheduling, I would model the allowed changes explicitly and review them with clinicians rather than accepting an ambiguous requirement. I would validate the first increment using acceptance criteria and a workflow demonstration before adding reporting or convenience features.

A marked oral response shows how a candidate handles conflicting requirements and where one more concrete acceptance criterion would improve it.
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