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Software Engineering → Introduction to Software Engineering 5

What is 'API contract testing' for backward compatibility and what specific breaking change category does semantic versioning fail to catch automatically?
Contract testing verifies actual API behaviour matches a published schema across versions; semantic versioning relies on humans correctly classifying changes — it fails to catch 'silent' breaking changes where a developer mistakenly tags a breaking change as a minor/patch bump (e.g., changing a field's data type while believing it's backward compatible), since SemVer is a convention, not an automatically enforced guarantee
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What is 'feature branch lifetime' standard and what specific risk increases non-linearly as branch age increases?
Coding standards often mandate short-lived branches (merge within 1-2 days) because merge conflict probability and complexity increase non-linearly with divergence time — both branches' code evolves independently, increasing the surface area of potential conflicts and the cognitive difficulty of resolving them correctly as more unrelated changes accumulate on both sides
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What is 'configuration as code' standard and what specific deployment risk does hardcoding configuration values introduce?
Configuration as code stores environment-specific settings (database URLs, API keys, feature flags) outside the application binary, in version-controlled config files or environment variables — hardcoding values (e.g., a production database URL embedded directly in source code) risks accidentally deploying production credentials to lower environments or requiring a full rebuild/redeploy for any configuration change, including emergency fixes
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What is 'dependency pinning' versus 'dependency ranges' in package management standards and what stability/security trade-off exists between them?
Pinning (exact version: 'lodash: 4.17.21') guarantees reproducible builds but requires manual intervention to receive security patches; ranges ('lodash: ^4.17.0') automatically receive compatible updates including security fixes but risk unexpected behaviour changes from a dependency's minor update breaking the application unexpectedly
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What is 'twelve-factor app' methodology's stance on logs and what anti-pattern does it explicitly discourage?
Twelve-factor treats logs as a stream of event data, written unbuffered to stdout — explicitly discouraging applications from managing their own log file rotation/storage/routing, since this couples the application to infrastructure concerns; instead, the execution environment captures stdout and routes it to the appropriate destination (file, log aggregator, etc.)
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Software Engineering → Coding Standards 1

What is 'graceful shutdown' coding standard for distributed services and what data loss risk does ignoring it create?
Graceful shutdown handlers respond to termination signals (SIGTERM) by finishing in-flight requests, closing database connections cleanly, and deregistering from service discovery before exiting — ignoring it (immediate process kill) risks dropping in-progress requests mid-transaction, leaving database connections in inconsistent states, and routing new traffic to a service that's already shutting down
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