JOBS4TIMES

Technical Aspects

1. What is your Project Architecture ?

   1. The reason behind asking this question is to check your acquaintance towards the project in which you are working . Most of the people feel difficulty in answering this question. You are experienced to explain the following this about your project like
      • Title of the project
      • Client
      • Team Size
      • Brief description about the functionally of the project .
   2. specifying the above things, now you should start explaining the modules in the project and which module you are working on and you should explain the technical flow of the project.
   3. If it is STRUTS application:
      You should explain the key components of it and how the request handling flow happens and how your struts components laiks to back end classes etc.
   4. In a Spring based application:
      You should explain which web module you are using, various components of it, typical request flow, how you integrated your web tier components of spring with back end spring beans etc.
   5. Along with the above you need to explain how you are implementing the transactionality , any secyrity related concepts etc. You should explain the database you are using , and your role towards it .

2. What are your roles and responsibilities in the project ?

   1. You should not explain in-terms the types of classes you coded, most of the people when they asked this question will try to tell I coded struts action classes or I involved in writing the DAO logic etc.
   2. With this you are in-directly leaving a wrong message to the interviewer stating my participation in the project is minimal.
   3. Instead you should select a module's (based on the experience) and start explaining your participation in those module's like, am involved in gathering the requirements , understanding and analyzing them and involved in few design considerations as well.
   4. Takes the ownership of implementing it, I was involved in handling the front-end parts of the application as well as writing the back-end DB related ligic as well.
   5. You should explain covering all the parts of your application showing your involvement towards it.

3. What are the technologies you have worked on ?

   1. You should explain the technologies you worked on as well as you know.
   2. You should first list out the technologies that your project is using and along with that you should describe what you know in-addition to them.
   3. While answering the technologies related to your project, you should even consider the versions which you are using in your projects.

4. What are the tools that are used in your projects ?

   1. This question relates to any third party tools that you are using in your project like code review tools, or profiling tools etc to improves the productivity of the project.
   2. Most likely you will use tools like :
      
      • Visio ---- for modeling
      • PMD ----Java code review tool
      • Any browser plug-in's like Fire Bug etc to debug javascripting etc.
      • IE developer to work with javascript and CSS.
      • Jdeveloper or TOAD to working with database.

   3. note: In may not be necessary to use a tool.

5. Which IDE you have used for the development ?

   1. Here you must explain him the IDE you are using for development if any other tools which you know apart from the one you are working on .
   2. Here the interviewer might ask you even the shortcuts keys of various things that you do for writing the programs.

6. What are the databases you worked on ?

   1. You need to specify the database on which your application is using .
   2. Here he might ask you questions related to database specific things like how to write the joins what is normalization and how your application is talking to database.

7. What are the server's /platform's you worked on ?

   1. Here you should possess minimum knowledge pertaining to the application server which you are using for deployment of your application .
   2. You should know the basic deployment steps of deploying the application, default administrative console , how to configure a Datasource , folders in which your application gets deployed etc.

8. Which OS/environment you are working on ?

   1. Few of the security related banking and financial applications will use for remote machines like citrix servers are etc for their development rather that working on their personnel PC provided, so here the interviewer will expects you to answer the environment in which you are working along with that OS you are using for development.
   2. The question is not concerned about on which Os platform you deploy in production rather it is talking about the platform on which you do development.

9. Have you ever been involved into Design ?

   1. The answer to this question depends on the experience you are claiming, If you are around a 1 - 2 + years of professional it may not be relevant to say you are part of design as your involvement towards project decisions would be minimal.
   2. If you are above 3+ years of experience , then you need to explain the key design you are involved in or what you worked out etc.

10. What is the reporting tool you are using in the Project ?

    1. Generally any application needs printing capabilities, generally java web based applications will produces data for printing in-terms of weg pages.
    2. If you have a typical printing requirement , you need to explain which library you are using to generate reports of data.
    3. Foe example Jasper reports or iText API for generating PDF's and POI API for generating excel sheets etc.

11. What is the CIS/build management tool used in you are project ?

    1. In a development environment after developing the application, in order to deploy your application , you use your IDE's to compile your code and deploy.
    2. But in a Testing and other environments , for every new check-in that goes into Source control , you code needs to be built to verify the sustainability of your code , so generally in they use Continuous Integration Systems or Build management tools which builds the application regularly similar to a Schedular and reports the health of your build cycle .
       
       Few of them are :
       Hudson ------ CIS tool
       AnthrilPro --- Build , Deploy , Test and Release tool

12. What is the volume of data against which your application runs ?

    1. In general a developer will not know the production environment and the volumes of data against which your applicationworks.
    2. Your technical architect should be taking these kinds of challenges and makes decision to have a particular usecase to be online or offline.
    3. So, you can always I don't know the exact numbers of records my application is running on .

13. How do you manage security like managing user credentials/data encryption etc ?

    1. In general you will take care of security your application by hosting on an SSL connection rather than plain HTTP.
    2. When it comes to data protection , generally the passwords that are being stored in the database will not be stored in a Plan text rather those will be converted into generally BASE16 or Base32 encoding formats and will be stored.
    3. You can even explain like we use Salted password technic in storing them.
    4. You can search about the salted password mechanism for more information.

14. How do you write Unit Test Cases ?

    1. You need to explain your participation of writing Unit test cases in your project.
    2. Generally for writing unit test cases us using Junit and Mocking Objects to mock the HTTP or other protocol specific things.
    3. You need to explain by talking atleast one of the test cases and write the code for how to work on it .