Question Bank: Computer Software Engineer

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Below, you will find questions divided into sub-categories for Computer Software Engineer.

Cultural Fit

1. If there is a day when you find yourself not fitting in our team, what will you do?
2. What aren’t you good at it? Who fills that role now on your team? How do you work together?
3. What has been your biggest career mistake? What did you learn? How did it change you, or your behavior?
4. What has been your greatest success?
5. What is the last thing you learned about algorithms from a book, magazine, or web site?
6. What is your ideal/work life balance? Is that different from your team? How do you achieve it and defend it?
7. What would your manager say about you? Your team? Your peers?
8. When have you had the most fun at work?
9. Where do you want to be in 5 years or 10 years?

General Knowledge

1. Describe the algorithm for a depth-first graph traversal.
2. Do you know what a regression test is? How do you verify that new changes have not broken existing features?
3. Do you know what code coverage is? What types of code coverage are there?
4. Do you know what load balancing is? Can you name different types of load balancing?
5. How are cookies passed in the HTTP protocol?
6. How can you implement unit testing when there are dependencies between a business layer and a data layer?
7. How do you create technical documentation for your products?
8. How do you deal with changes that a customer wants in a released product?
9. How would you manage changes to technical documentation, like the architecture of a product?
10. How would you treat simultaneous development of multiple RfC's or increments and maintenance issues?
11. In Java, what is the difference between final, finally, and finalize?
12. What is important when updating a product that is in production and is being used?
13. What is multithreaded programming? What is a deadlock?
14. What is the difference between a mutex and a semaphore? Which one would you use to protect access to an increment operation?
15. What is the difference between re-engineering and reverse engineering?
16. What is the difference between storing data on the heap vs. on the stack?
17. What kind of tests would you include for a smoke test of an ecommerce web site?
18. What measures have you taken to make your software products more easily maintainable?
19. What’s the difference between local and global variables?
20. You are given the source to an application that is crashing when run. After running it 10 times in a debugger, you find it never crashes in the same place. The application is single threaded and uses only the C standard library. What programming errors could be causing this crash? How would you test each one?

General Knowledge of Testing

1. Are you familiar with collaboration tools? Which communication method do you prefer for talk, email, and chat?
2. Can you name a suitable bit wise operator for checking whether a certain bit is on or off?
3. Do you know the difference between functional testing and exploratory testing? How would you test a web site?
4. Have you used MSVC? What do you think of it?
5. How do you start your QA if there are no system requirements?
6. What bug tracking tools you have used? Have you used any free tools?
7. What can you do reduce the chance that a customer finds things that he doesn't like during acceptance testing?
8. What is the difference between a test suite, a test case, and a test plan? How would you organize testing?
9. What programming language are you using?
10. What security tools have you used?
11. Why do you think you are suited for this job?

Knowledge of Languages

1. Are you able to name any sort of advantages of the macro over the function?
2. Can you name the main difference between preemptive scheduling and time slicing?
3. Describe your experience working with Ruby on Rails?
4. Exactly what does static variable mean? (This is one of the most basic C interview questions)
5. How do you make sure that your code can handle different kinds of error situations?
6. In general, what is better to use: a function or a macro?
7. What do you care about most when reviewing somebody else's code?
8. What exactly will be the difference between calloc() and malloc() ?
9. What is the number 21 in binary format? And in hex?
10. What type of language do you prefer for writing complex algorithms?
11. What type of language do you prefer for writing complex data structures?

Knowledge of Tools

1. Apart from the IDE, which other favorite tools do you use that you think are essential to you?
2. Can you declare static variables within the header file?
3. Can you explain me the levels in V model manual?
4. Can you name a number of different techniques for specifying requirements? What works best in which case?
5. Can you name a number of non-functional (or quality) requirements?
6. Can you name any differences between object-oriented design and component-based design?
7. Can you name different measures to guarantee correctness and robustness of data in an architecture?
8. Can you name different measures to guarantee correctness of data entry?
9. Can you name different techniques for prototyping an application?
10. Can you name different ways of designing access to a large and complex list of features?
11. Can you name examples of how an application can anticipate user behavior?
12. Can you name some different text file formats for storing Unicode characters?
13. Can you name the different tiers and responsibilities in an N-tier architecture?
14. Describe and write an implementation of memory function and suggest improvements.
15. Design a work breakdown structure for the user story. The user story was as a User I can manage my group's projects and administrate them.
16. Explain Microsoft Six Rules Standard for User Interface testing?
17. From some given tasks, you need to figure out a proper data model design
18. Have you had any experience with Visual Basic?
19. What data structures would you use to implement a set?
20. What kind of tools are important to you for monitoring a product during maintenance?
21. Which tools are essential to you for testing the quality of your code?
22. Which tools do you like to use for keeping track of requirements?
23. Which tools do you need to manage the state of all digital information in a project? Which tools do you like best?

Most Popular Questions

1. Are there differences in managing versions and releases?
2. Can you name reasons why maintenance of software is the most expensive part of an application's life cycle?
3. Can you name the responsibilities of the user, the customer, and the developer in the requirements process?
4. Can you tell me something that you have learned about testing and quality assurance in the last year?
5. How do you make sure that your code is both safe and fast?
6. How would you store the results of a soccer/football competition (with teams and scores) in an XML document?
7. What are the qualities of good software?
8. What is the difference between a queue and a stack?
9. What is the last thing you learned about data structures from a book, magazine, or website?
10. What is the maximum number of lines you have coded for a project?
11. What was the most challenging project you have ever worked on?

Problem Solving

1. Can you describe the process you use for writing a piece of code, from requirements to delivery?
2. Can you name an example of a recursive solution that you created?
3. Can you name examples of anticipating changing requirements in your code?
4. How can you debug a system in a production environment, while it is being used?
5. How can you reduce the user's perception of waiting when some functions take a lot of time?
6. How do you find an error in a large file with code that you cannot step through?
7. How do you find out if a number is a power of 2? And how do you know if it is an odd number?
8. How do you find the middle item in a linked list?
9. How do you manage conflicts in a web application when different people are editing the same data?
10. How do you manage conflicts in web applications when there are different people managing data?
11. How do you prioritize requirements? Do you know different techniques?
12. How do you search and find requirements? What are possible sources?
13. How will you handle multiple projects which have the same deadline?
14. How would you change the format of all the phone numbers in 10,000 static html web pages?
15. How would you design editing twenty fields for a list of 10 items? And editing 3 fields for a list of 1000 items?
16. How would you model the animal kingdom (with species and their behavior) as a class system?
17. How would you store a vector in N dimensions in a data table?
18. If your database was under a lot of strain, what are the first few things you might consider to speed it up?
19. In an array with integers between 1 and 1,000,000 one value is in the array twice. How do you determine which one?
20. Tell us about 3 times you failed. How did you manage that?
21. What do you do when you get stuck with a problem you can't solve?
22. What do you do with requirements that are incomplete or incomprehensible?
23. What is the problem of using different colors when highlighting pieces of text?
24. What is your advice when a customer wants high performance, high usability, and high security?
25. What types of problems have you encountered most often in your products after deployment?
26. When do you use polymorphism and when do you use delegates?
27. Which is faster: finding an item in a hashtable or in a sorted list?
28. You have two computers, and you want to get data from one to the other. How could you do it?

Skill Specific

1. Can you explain what Test-Driven Development is? Can you name some principles of Extreme Programming?
2. Can you name different techniques for prototyping an application? Explain the limitations of web environment vs. the Windows environment.
3. Can you name some limitations of a web environment vs. a Windows environment?
4. Can you tell me Different ways being able to design or program so complex features appear?
5. Do you know about design patterns? Which design patterns have you used, and in what situations?
6. Do you know about the Traveling Salesman Problem?
7. Do you know the differences between tags and branches? When do you use which?
8. Do you know what a baseline is in configuration management? How do you freeze an important moment in a project?
9. Do you know what a stateless business layer is? Where do long-running transactions fit into that picture?
10. Explain the life cycle of an application development process you worked on previously.
11. How can you make sure that changes in code will not affect any other parts of the product?
12. How can you make sure that team members know who changed what in a software project?
13. How do you treat changing requirements? Are they good or bad? Why?
14. How would you implement the structure of the London underground in a computer's memory?
15. How would you model user authorization, user profiles and permissions in a database?
16. How would you store the value of a color in a database, as efficiently as possible?
17. How would you write a function to reverse a string? And can you do that without a temporary string?
18. What are different techniques for prototyping an application?
19. What are metaphors used in the functional design? Can you name some successful examples?
20. What do low coupling and high cohesion mean? What does the principle of encapsulation mean?
21. What experience do you bring to this position?
22. What is requirements tracing? What is backward tracing vs. forward tracing?
23. What is the difference between managing changes in text files vs. managing changes in binary files?
24. What kinds of diagrams have you used in designing parts of an architecture, or a technical design?
25. What software language have you used to design, develop, and debug software applications?
26. When do you use an abstract class and when do you use an interface?
27. When would you use a class with static members and when would you use a Singleton class?
28. Which controls would you use when a user must select multiple items from a big list, in a minimal amount of space?
29. Which items do you normally place under version control?