Question

The following are situations for which software configuration management shall be performed. For each, write your respond accordingly.

a) Imagine a situation where two developers are simultaneously modifying three different software components. Explain TWO (2) difficulties that might arise when they try to merge the changes they have made? Provide your suggestions on how to overcome those difficulties. [Note: Length of answer is not more than 1 page.]

b) A common problem with system building occurs when physical filenames are incorporated in system code and the file structure implied in these names differs from that of the target machine. Write a set of programmer’s guidelines that helps avoid this and any other system-building problems that you can think of. Provide your justifications for the needs of such guidelines. [Note: You need to give ONLY THREE (3) guidelines and their corresponding justifications. Length of answer is between 1 – 2 pages.]

Answer 1

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a) Imagine a situation where two developers are simultaneously modifying three different software components. Explain TWO (2) difficulties that might arise when they try to merge the changes they have made? Provide your suggestions on how to overcome those difficulties.

There are common repositories such as GIT, tortoise GIT, Jenkins where in code made by several other developers over a common component or functionality can be pushed in for storage or error checking. When one ore more developers make changes on a same component of code following issues may occur :

• Database dependency issues might occur : a new column created by one developer in code might not reflect in the code merged by the other developer
• Any new API or jar functional dependency issue : An existing functionality that is working already might be altered by one developer to include a new jar or API that has added a new functionality might not work when the other developer who does not have this functionality , merges the code.

In order to solve these issues, there must be separate development branch maintained in GIT by developers where code can be pushed at the end of day everyday and the next day the developers must be required to pull a latest working branch at the start of the day every morning to ensure that they are working on the latest version of the code. Also, this helps in having a trace of which developer has done which change to ensure error tracing and rolling back can be more easier.

b) A common problem with system building occurs when physical filenames are incorporated in system code and the file structure implied in these names differs from that of the target machine. Write a set of programmer’s guidelines that helps avoid this and any other system-building problems that you can think of. Provide your justifications for the needs of such guidelines.

There are several implications on naming conventions laid out by various versions of operating systems such as prevention of usage of special characters such as {}_>< and so on in the file name as they might hinder with the execution criteria of the operating system. Anything behind the user interface of the operating system that directly interacts with the hardware in order to perform the execution is a form of assembly language and thus having any special characters or other implications with similar reference might result in interference with code that might result in improper execution or alteration of the exact functionality.

Most common assembly language written under the base of operating system are in read only format and execute only format meaning that they can be executed as is and should not/cannot be altered upon. Thus the instructions and limits are laid upon the user interface to prevent the usage of special characters or similar ones in the file names while creating the same via user interface channels.

Following guidelines are to be followed by programmers :

• File should be named consistently.
• Any kind of special characters should be avoided in the file name.
• ISO 8601: YYYYMMDD date format should be followed.
• Capitals and underscores should be used instead of periods or spaces or slashes.
• Avoid special characters or space in filename.