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2009 Graduate Student Comprehensive Exams

in CS and SWE

The Comprehensive Exams will be held on Saturday, April 11, 2009 from 10am to 3pm in Chapman 106. Please send an email to Dr. Lawlor if you need to sign up for them. Your Appointment of Committee and Graduate Study Plan need to be filed before you take the Comps. The Comps are normally offered only once a year, and you only get two chances to pass the Comps, so study hard!

Here is the CS Comps Study Guide (2008), as a PDF. Dr. Knoke has prepared a separate study guide for the SWE portion of the CS comps.

The SWE Comps will also be broken into four one-hour sections, with a one-hour lunch break in the middle.  The SWE comps will closely follow the IEEE SWEBOK (Software Engineering Body of Knowledge) exam sections; see the handy online book Guide to the SWEBOK for details on each section.

  • Software Requirements (II)
    • - Dr. Knoke, with input from Dr. Roth
    • Covers material from CS 673.
    • This would also be amenable to case studies.
  • Software Design (III)
    • - Dr. Knoke, with input from Dr. Roth
    • Covers material from CS 671 & 674.
    • Could also include software architecture.
    • This would be a good section for some case studies.
  • (One Hour Lunch Break)
  • Software Construction (IV), Testing (V), Software Quality (XI), and Maintenance (VI)
    • - Dr. Lawlor, with input from Dr. Knoke and Dr. Roth
    • Covers material from CS 671, and pre-admission knowledge
    • Also includes a few "general CS" questions; basically "can you write and read code?"
  • Software Engineering Management (VIII), Business Practices (I), Engineering Process (IX), Tools & Methods (X)
    • - Dr. Nance
    • Covers material from CS 602
The required textbooks which have been used for our four required SWE courses are also recommended for study in preparation for the UAF MSE Comprehensive Examination. These are:

[SWE01] Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, Bourque and Dupuis (ed), IEEE Computer Society, 2001. Also available online
[SOM07] Software Engineering ,8e, Sommerville, Addison-Wesley, 2007.
[PRE05] Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, 6e, Pressman, McGraw-Hill, 2005.
[BAS03] Software Architecture in Practice, 2e, Bass, Clements, Kazman, Addison-Wesley, 2003.
[SOM97] Requirements Engineering – A Good Practice Guide, Sommerville&Sawyer, Wiley, 1997.
[THA02] Software Requirements Engineering, 2e, Thayer&Dorfman, IEEE Computer Society, 2002.
[KNO04] CS673-Software Requirements Engineering, Knoke, UAF CDE, 2004.

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