Senior Software Developer

☛ Can you name a number of non-functional (or quality) requirements?

☛ What is your advice when a customer wants high performance, high usability and high security?

☛ Can you name a number of different techniques for specifying requirements? What works best in which case?

☛ What is requirements tracing? What is backward tracing vs. forward tracing?

☛ Which tools do you like to use for keeping track of requirements?

☛ How do you treat changing requirements? Are they good or bad? Why?

☛ How do you search and find requirements? What are possible sources?

☛ How do you prioritize requirements? Do you know different techniques?

☛ Can you name the responsibilities of the user, the customer and the developer in the requirements process?

☛ What do you do with requirements that are incomplete or incomprehensible?

☛ What is something substantive that you've done to improve as a developer in your career?

☛ Would you call yourself a craftsman (craftsperson) and what does that word mean to you?

☛ Implement a <basic data structure> using <some language> on <paper|whiteboard|notepad>.

☛ What is SOLID?

☛ Why is the Single Responsibility Principle important?

☛ What is Inversion of Control? How does that relate to dependency injection?

☛ How does a 3 tier application differ from a 2 tier one?

☛ Why are interfaces important?

☛ What is the Repository pattern? The Factory Pattern? Why are patterns important?

☛ What are some examples of anti-patterns?

☛ Who are the Gang of Four? Why should you care?

☛ How do the MVP, MVC, and MVVM patterns relate? When are they appropriate?

☛ Explain the concept of Separation of Concerns and it's pros and cons.

☛ Name three primary attributes of object-oriented design. Describe what they mean and why they're important.

☛ Describe a pattern that is NOT the Factory Pattern? How is it used and when?

☛ You have just been put in charge of a legacy code project with maintainability problems. What kind of things would you look to improve to get the project on a stable footing?

☛ Show me a portfolio of all the applications you worked on, and tell me how you contributed to design them.

☛ What are some alternate ways to store data other than a relational database? Why would you do that, and what are the trade-offs?

☛ Explain the concept of convention over configuration, and talk about an example of convention over configuration you have seen in the wild.

☛ Explain the differences between stateless and stateful systems, and impacts of state on parallelism.

☛ Discuss the differences between Mocks and Stubs/Fakes and where you might use them (answers aren't that important here, just the discussion that would ensue).

☛ Discuss the concept of YAGNI and explain something you did recently that adhered to this practice.

☛ Explain what is meant by a sandbox, why you would use one, and identify examples of sandboxes in the wild.

☛ Concurrency

☛ What's the difference between Locking and Lockless (Optimistic and Pessimistic) concurrency models?

☛ What kinds of problems can you hit with locking model? And a lockless model?

☛ What trade offs do you have for resource contention?

☛ How might a task-based model differ from a threaded model?

☛ What's the difference between asynchrony and concurrency?

☛ Are you still writing code? Do you love it?

☛ You've just been assigned to a project in a new technology how would you get started?

☛ How does the addition of Service Orientation change systems? When is it appropriate to use?

☛ What do you do to stay abreast of the latest technologies and tools?

☛ What is the difference between "set" logic, and "procedural" logic. When would you use each one and why?

☛ What Source Control systems have you worked with?

☛ What is Continuous Integration? Have you used it and why is it important?

☛ Describe a software development life cycle that you've managed.

☛ How do you react to people criticizing your code/documents?

☛ Whose blogs or podcasts do you follow? Do you blog or podcast?

☛ Tell me about some of your hobby projects that you've written in your off time.

☛ What is the last programming book you read?

☛ Describe, in as much detail as you think is relevant, as deeply as you can, what happens when I type "cnn.com" into a browser and press "Go".

☛ Describe the structure and contents of a design document, or a set of design documents, for a multi-tiered web application.

☛ What's so great about <cool web technology of the day>?

☛ How can you stop your DBA from making off with a list of your users’ passwords?

☛ What do you do when you get stuck with a problem you can't solve?

☛ If your database was under a lot of strain, what are the first few things you might consider to speed it up?

☛ What is SQL injection?

☛ What's the difference between unit test and integration test?

☛ Tell me about 3 times you failed.

☛ What is Refactoring ? Have you used it and it is important? Name three common refactorings.

☛ You have two computers, and you want to get data from one to the other. How could you do it?

☛ Left to your own devices, what would you create?

☛ Given Time, Cost, Client satisfaction and Best Practices, how will you prioritize them for a project you are working on? Explain why.

☛ What's the difference between a web server, web farm and web garden? How would your web application need to change for each?

☛ What value do daily builds, automated testing, and peer reviews add to a project? What disadvantages are there?

☛ What elements of OO design are most prone to abuse? How would you mitigate that?

☛ When do you know your code is ready for production?

☛ What's YAGNI? Is this list of questions an example?

☛ Describe to me some bad code you've read or inherited lately.

☛ How would you implement the structure of the London underground in a computer’s memory?

☛ How would you store the value of a color in a database, as efficiently as possible?

☛ What is the difference between a queue and a stack?

☛ What is the difference between storing data on the heap vs. on the stack?

☛ How would you store a vector in N dimensions in a datatable?

☛ What type of language do you prefer for writing complex data structures?

☛ What is the number 21 in binary format? And in hex?

☛ What is the last thing you learned about data structures from a book, magazine or web site?

☛ How would you store the results of a soccer/football competition (with teams and scores) in an XML document?

☛ Can you name some different text file formats for storing unicode characters?

☛ What are metaphors used for in functional design? Can you name some successful examples?

☛ How can you reduce the user’s perception of waiting when some functions take a lot of time?

☛ Which controls would you use when a user must select multiple items from a big list, in a minimal amount of space?

☛ Can you name different measures to guarantee correctness of data entry?

☛ Can you name different techniques for prototyping an application?

☛ Can you name examples of how an application can anticipate user behavior?

☛ Can you name different ways of designing access to a large and complex list of features?

☛ How would you design editing twenty fields for a list of 10 items? And editing 3 fields for a list of 1000 items?

☛ What is the problem of using different colors when highlighting pieces of a text?

☛ Can you name some limitations of a web environment vs. a Windows environment?

☛ What do low coupling and high cohesion mean? What does the principle of encapsulation mean?

☛ How do you manage conflicts in a web application when different people are editing the same data?

☛ Do you know about design patterns? Which design patterns have you used, and in what situations?

☛ Do you know what a stateless business layer is? Where do long-running transactions fit into that picture?

☛ What kinds of diagrams have you used in designing parts of an architecture, or a technical design?

☛ Can you name the different tiers and responsibilities in an N-tier architecture?

☛ Can you name different measures to guarantee correctness and robustness of data in an architecture?

☛ Can you name any differences between object-oriented design and component-based design?

☛ How would you model user authorization, user profiles and permissions in a database?

☛ How would you model the animal kingdom (with species and their behavior) as a class system?

☛ Do you know what a baseline is in configuration management? How do you freeze an important moment in a project?

☛ Which items do you normally place under version control?

☛ How can you make sure that team members know who changed what in a software project?

☛ Do you know the differences between tags and branches? When do you use which?

☛ How would you manage changes to technical documentation, like the architecture of a product?

☛ Which tools do you need to manage the state of all digital information in a project? Which tools do you like best?

☛ How do you deal with changes that a customer wants in a released product?

☛ Are there differences in managing versions and releases?

☛ What is the difference between managing changes in text files vs. managing changes in binary files?

☛ How would you treat simultaneous development of multiple RfC’s or increments and maintenance issues?

☛ What kind of tools are important to you for monitoring a product during maintenance?

☛ What is important when updating a product that is in production and is being used?

☛ How do you find an error in a large file with code that you cannot step through?

☛ How can you make sure that changes in code will not affect any other parts of the product?

☛ How do you create technical documentation for your products?

☛ What measures have you taken to make your software products more easily maintainable?

☛ How can you debug a system in a production environment, while it is being used?

☛ Do you know what load balancing is? Can you name different types of load balancing?

☛ Can you name reasons why maintenance of software is the biggest/most expensive part of an application’s life cycle?

☛ What is the difference between re-engineering and reverse engineering?

☛ How do you find out if a number is a power of 2? And how do you know if it is an odd number?

☛ How do you find the middle item in a linked list?

☛ How would you change the format of all the phone numbers in 10,000 static html web pages?

☛ Can you name an example of a recursive solution that you created?

☛ Which is faster: finding an item in a hashtable or in a sorted list?

☛ What is the last thing you learned about algorithms from a book, magazine or web site?

☛ How would you write a function to reverse a string? And can you do that without a temporary string?

☛ What type of language do you prefer for writing complex algorithms?

☛ In an array with integers between 1 and 1,000,000 one value is in the array twice. How do you determine which one?

☛ Do you know about the Traveling Salesman Problem?