Pipeline Reliability and Test Strategy Questions

Design continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines for reliability and early defect detection. Focus on structuring pipelines and tests to catch problems early, including unit tests, integration tests, contract tests, end to end tests, and load tests where appropriate, plus security scanning and static analysis. Understand test gating strategies, how to structure pipelines by change type such as configuration versus code versus infrastructure, test data and environment management, techniques to mitigate flaky tests, and metrics and feedback loops to measure pipeline reliability. Candidates should also be able to design staged deployments with appropriate gates and rollbacks to minimize production risk.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Explain property-based testing for data transformations and provide one concrete property for a deduplication function (for example, idempotency and non-increasing cardinality). Outline how you would implement that property test using a property-based testing library such as Hypothesis in Python.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Explain mutation testing and how it could be applied to ETL code to measure the quality of your test suite. Describe benefits, potential pitfalls for data code, and how you would integrate mutation testing into CI in a way that balances feedback usefulness and runtime cost.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Describe how to build a test harness for Spark transformations that allows fast local unit tests and full integration runs. Include how to instantiate a local SparkSession for unit tests, how to mock external stores like S3, and how to share test fixtures across tests to reduce setup time.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

You are given a simple Python transform function to test. The function is: `def transform_row(row): if row.get('value') is None: return None return {'id': row['id'], 'value': row['value'] * 2}`. Write pytest unit tests that cover normal cases and edge cases including None values and missing keys. Explain test fixtures and asserts you would use.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Propose how to integrate static analysis and security scanning into a data pipeline CI workflow. Include checks for SQL injection or unsafe dynamic SQL generation, linter and style checks, secrets scanning, and how to fail fast on security-critical findings while allowing non-critical issues to be tracked.

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