Advanced software engineering interview questions and answers

This is an important software engineering interview question that is often asked in interviews. Some of the software development challenges are:

• The rapid advancement of technology: Technology evolves at a phenomenal pace, thus, exerting pressure on software developers to learn and adapt to maintain competitiveness.
• Increasing demands of customers: Different customers have different needs. Software developers must understand the business concept to understand the software requirements of the customers.
• Time constraints: Software developers need to work under strict time deadlines. For remote software developers, the challenge is even bigger as they straddle timezones. Time constraints can reduce the efficiency of software developers and end in mediocre quality software products.
• Limited resources: Many software development companies still struggle with a lack of IT resources such as high-performing software development tools, robust computing platforms, incompetent data storage, and inefficient network capabilities. All these can reduce the overall efficiency and performance of the software development team.
• Disagreements with software testing teams: Software development and software testing teams are often at loggerheads with each other. Major reasons for the same are the difference in team mindsets and job roles, the opposite nature of development and testing, and high work and performance pressure.
• Coping with legacy systems: Many organizations still run with older legacy systems and this can raise the risk of security, inefficiency, and lack of technological compatibility. Thus, the modernization of legacy software is a pressing need.
• Heterogeneity challenge: Since customer demands evolve constantly, an advanced challenge in software development is to create flexible and dependable software that can adapt to changing and future needs.

The limitations of the RAD model are:

• This model has a sufficiently high requirement of human resources to build the required number of teams.
• The system does not work if the developers and users don’t stay committed.
• If the system is not correctly modularized, it may lead to problems in building components.
• If the technical risk is high, this model is not applicable.

When answering software development interview questions about the limitations of certain models, you can also talk about times when you faced such limitations and how you coped with them.

The following steps are needed for software development:

• Brainstorming and planning: This stage determines the purpose and functions for which the software program must be developed.
• Project team analysis: This stage determines the team members, tools, and time frame required for the project.
• Design stage: At this stage, the designated software development team designs the program.
• Development stage: This is the stage where the final functionality of the software is developed.
• Quality assurance and testing: This is the penultimate, but perhaps the most important stage before finally launching the program. Here, any bugs, defects, or errors are identified and rectified.
• Launch: This is when the program is finally installed and launched for the intended users.

This type of software engineering interview question is about you and the processes you follow to ensure quality. As a senior developer, you must be proficient in quality assurance. You must also have a process for identifying software bugs and fixing them. For example, you could use code-based testing for finding possible bugs. You could ask another member of your team to peer review your code for the software you are testing. They could find an error in logic leading to incorrect output. You can correct the code and then use dynamic testing to check if the functionality of the software is on-point. It will, hopefully, be.

Functional and object-oriented programming are both used in software development. Here are the differences between them:

While functional programming uses and depends on mathematical functions, object-oriented programming depends on object classes that are closely related to the functions. In functional programming, one works only with functions. In object-oriented programming, one can store functions inside objects. The languages functional programming supports are Python, Javascript, Scala, and Haskell. The languages object-oriented programming supports are Python, Java, C++, Lisp, and Perl.

Some of the benefits of Smoke-testing are listed below:

• It minimizes the risk of integration

• It improves the end-product quality

• It simplifies the diagnosis and correction of errors

• It makes assessing progress easy

Equivalence partitioning is a method for testing software where the input data of a software unit is divided into partitions containing equivalent data. These partitions help in deriving the test cases, which, in principle, must cover each partition at least once. Through partitioning, the test cases can detect classes of errors, and hence reduce the number of test cases to be developed. Since the number of test cases reduces, the time required for software testing reduces too. Though this method is usually applied to a tested component’s inputs, in some rare cases it could also be applied to the outputs.

These are two types of acceptance tests.

• Alpha test: Alpha tests are tests where the customer assesses a full-version software under the developer’s supervision. This kind of testing happens at the developer’s site.
• Beta test: Beta tests are tests where the customer assesses a version of the software without the developer’s supervision. This kind of testing happens at the customer’s site.

The three types of static testing tools are:

• Code-based: For these testing tools, the source code functions as the input and they use that to generate the test cases.
• Specialized: In these testing tools, the language is used to write detailed test specifications for every test case.
• Requirement-based: These testing tools design the test cases as per the user requirements.

For such a question in the software developer interview, remember to add instances from personal experience.

The different types of software maintenance are as follows:

• Corrective: Corrective maintenance is used for correcting the faults in the software.
• Adaptive: Adaptive maintenance helps the software to adapt to changes in its environment.
• Perfective: Perfective maintenance helps in changing or improving the system to meet the new requirements.
• Preventive: Preventive maintenance refers to the alterations made to enhance future maintainability.