So it was all there, more or less. Redundancy, risk assessment, situation awareness, electromagnetic interference and ALARP. It's just a shame I didn't seem to know that much about them.
As was foretold the exam contained all the topics that Chris had suggested it would. The questions are outlined below:
Question 1
- A - Redundancy, hot and cold standbys [3]
- B - Risk assessment, describing and writing [7]
- C - Situation awareness [10]
Question 2
- A - White box testing [5]
- B - Contrast in software checking [7]
- C - Software checking [8]
Question 3
- A - Electromagnetic interference [3]
- B - Demonstration of EM safeness [7]
- C - Use of redundancy to combat EM protection [10]
Question 4
- A - ALARP [20]
From an initial look at the paper it became apparent that I was going to be doing questions 1, 2 and 3, because I knew nothing about ALARP at all (I couldn't find anything about it in the course). Question 1 stared off reasonably well with a redundancy question, then got slightly harder with the inclusion of risk assessment and situation awareness. This wasn't helped by my inability to recall half the things I knew about either subject. A quick semi-FMECA and some utter dribble about situation awareness (where I repeated the same paragraph thrice), it was off onto question 2.
The initial white box testing part of this question was reasonably straight forward. The second and third parts were rooted in the realm of checking the software used in Formula One cars. 'Nuff said really. Didn't know what to write for all the marks, waffled a lot and hopefully picked up a few stray marks.
Question 3 was one which I thought I would have got on well with, all about EM interference (a topic I had read just 2 hours before coming to the exam). When I started to answer the question I was totally stumped for anything meaningful to say. Again, more waffle and then some padding with even more waffle. Chris is going to have fun marking this!
Quite a disappointment, I was feeling Ok about this exam until looking past the first question - probably due to the intoxicating tiredness. I've been up for 29 and a half hours, so I'm off to bed!
- Chris