Midterm Study Guide

When: Monday, October 19, 2026, in class (50 minutes) Weight: 15% of your grade Format: a TCU Online quiz, taken on your laptop in Respondus LockDown Browser Allowed: your laptop, running the exam in LockDown Browser. No notes, no other devices, no agent.

Before Monday: install LockDown Browser (TCU Online links the download from the exam's page) and launch it once to make sure it runs. Bring your laptop charged. If you have no working laptop, tell the instructor before class; a few paper copies will be on hand.

What the exam looks like

Short typed answers. Most questions hand you something (a requirement, a use case step, a design excerpt, a few lines of Project Pulse code, a situation on a team) and ask you to judge it: what is wrong, what you would do, and why. A good answer names the specific defect and the specific fix. A paragraph of correct vocabulary that never commits to a judgment earns little.

Expect about six questions, each like the samples below. One of them is about your own team's project, answered from what your team has merged: the specification, the architecture-of-record, and your proving slice's design. Plan on seven or eight minutes a question, which leaves a few minutes to reread.

There is no recall section. You will not be asked to reproduce a definition for its own sake, but you will need the definitions to answer.

How to study

Every module ends with a Self-check. Those questions are the practice set, and they are the shape of the exam.

1. Answer each Self-check question in writing, without the module open and without an agent. A sentence or three is enough.
2. Then reread the section the question comes from and mark what you missed.
3. Where a question asks about "your project", answer it about your team's real specification and architecture. You wrote them; use them.

Asking an agent to answer the Self-checks for you is the one way to study that does not work, because the exam is the one room where you will not have it. Use the agent afterward instead: have it argue against your answer.

Your own work is study material too. Assignment 2 and your team's specification and architecture-of-record exercise most of weeks 3 to 7.

What to study, week by week

Week	Topic	Read closely	Practice
1	What software engineering is, and what AI changed	Reading: what software engineering is, what a requirement is, AI is an amplifier, the delegation boundary, agenda capture, the Napkin	Self-check
2	The AI-augmented team	Reading: 4.1 to 4.9 and 4.12 (what the agent can see, well-formed issues, branches, pull requests, the traceability chain, onboarding the agent)	Self-check
2	Professionalism	Reading: the four steps (observe, analyze, investigate, fix) and escalation. Expect at most one scenario question.	Self-check
3 and 4	Requirements as the contract	Reading: business objectives and success metrics, the glossary, the kinds of requirement, use cases (4.10 to 4.17), business rules, quality attributes. Also Requirement Types.	Self-check
5	Context engineering	Reading: all of section 4, especially 4.3 to 4.8	Self-check
6	Software architecture	Reading: 4.1 to 4.4, 4.6, 4.7, 4.9, 4.11 (quality attributes, architecturally significant requirements, decomposition by domain, one deployable or several, the trust boundary, writing a decision down)	Self-check
7	Design-of-record	Reading: 4.1 to 4.7, 4.9, 4.10, 4.12, 4.13 (how much to write, finding the classes, sequence diagrams, the API contract, design decisions, when the design changes the architecture, the questions test, the design gate, the proving slice)	Self-check

The slides for each week are on the Schedule. They are the fast review; the readings are what the questions are written from.

Not on the midterm

• Anything from week 8 on: estimation, security, AI-assisted implementation, code review, traceability, and testing. They are examined on the final.

Sample questions

These show the shape, not the content, of the real exam. No answers are posted: compare yours with a classmate, in Slack, or in office hours.

1. A teammate writes this requirement: "Students who haven't submitted their weekly activity report should be reminded." Name two decisions it leaves open that an agent would make for you, then rewrite it so a test could decide whether the system meets it.
2. Project Pulse's getPeerEvaluationAverage ends in .average().orElse(0.0), so a student nobody evaluated gets an average of 0.0. No business rule mentions the case. Who should decide what that student sees, and how does your team get the answer? Write the business rule you would propose to them.
3. An agent's design-of-record for a new "export peer evaluations" use case includes a Strategy pattern with CSV and PDF exporters. The use case mentions only CSV. Its API contract lists one response, 200 OK, while the use case has three extensions. You are the reviewer on the pull request. What do you ask for before you approve, and why?

Related

• Assignments: both exams, and the final's scope.
• Syllabus: how exams fit the grade, and the academic integrity rule for exams.
• Modules: every reading in one place.