Software Architecture

11. What are the forces which led the evolution of shared information systems in software development? 

• The advent of on-line computing 

• The concern for efficiency 

• The need for management to control entire software development process 

12. Define Integrated environments for building design. 

Integrated environments for building design are frame works for controlling a collection of stand-alone applications that solve part of the building design problem. 

13. What the concerns in developing integrated environments for building designs? 

• Efficient in managing problem solving and information exchange 

• Flexible in dealing with changes to tools 

• Graceful in reacting to changes in information and problem-solving strategies 

14. What are the common responsibilities of a system for distributed problem solving? 

• Problem partitioning 

• Task distribution 

• Agent control 

• Agent communication 

15. Give the characteristics of Batch sequential systems. 

• Very coarse-grained 

• Unable to provide feedback in real time 

• Unable to exploit concurrency 

• Unlikely to proceed at an interactive pace 

16. Write the characteristics of pipe-and-filter systems. 

• Fine-grained 

• Able to produce the output in right way 

• Able to provide feedback 

• Often interactive 

17. Define design space. 

Design space consists of design rules that indicate good and bad combinations of choices, and use them to select an appropriate system designed based on functional requirements. 

18. Define functional design space. 

The dimensions that describe functional and performance requirements make up the functional design space. 

19. Define structural design space. 

The dimensions that describe structural and performance requirements make up the structural design space. 

20. What are the type components in systems that are classified by the user-interface systems? 

• An application-specific component 

• A shared user interface 

• A device-dependent 

21. What the functional dimensions identified the requirements for a user-interface system? 

• External requirements 

• Basic interactive behaviour 

• Practical considerations. 

22. What are the dimensions in a computer organization that classifies the basic nature of  the environment? 

• Uniprocessing 

• Multiprocessing 

• Distributed processing 

23. What the structural dimensions that represents the decisions determining the overall structure of a user-interface system? 

• Division of functions and knowledge among modules 

• Representation issues 

• Control flow, communication, and synchronization issues 

24. Define the term Monolithic program. 

In a monolithic program there is no separation between application-specific and shared code, hence no such interface and no device interface. This can be an appropriate solution in small, specialized systems where the application needs considerable control over user-interface details and little processing power is available. 

25. What do you mean by the term Nonpreemptive process? 

Processes without preemptive scheduling, usually in a shared address space. These are only relatively simple to implement. Guaranteeing short response time is difficult and affects the entire system: long computations must be broken up explicitly.