Paper - II (xii) — Software Engineering MCQ - Practice Questions with Answers

DFDs model data transformations through processes. External entities are sources or sinks outside the system boundary, and data stores hold data for later use. A direct external-entity-to-store flow bypasses the processing step that should validate, transform or record the data, so a process must intervene.

Actual programming is done during the development or coding phase of the SDLC, and documentation is commonly prepared alongside it. Design decides the structure before coding, while analysis identifies requirements. Maintenance and evaluation occur after the software has been developed and delivered.

PERT/CPM scheduling represents activities and dependencies as a network. The critical path is the path whose total duration fixes the earliest possible project completion date; activities on it usually have zero slack. Shortening non-critical work may not reduce the project finish unless it affects the critical path.

The context diagram is the top-level DFD view: it treats the system as a single process and identifies outside actors or systems that exchange data with it. That makes it useful during requirements analysis for fixing scope and interfaces before internal decomposition begins.

Mutation testing is a fault-based testing technique because it deliberately seeds small faults, called mutations or mutants, into a program and checks whether the test suite detects them. Stress, unit, and beta testing are not classified by this fault-seeding idea. Therefore, option D is correct.