Software Engineering Practices Topics
Covers industry-standard practices for building maintainable, high-quality software, including code quality, maintainability, documentation, and effective technical communication within engineering teams.
Technical Debt and Trade Offs
Framing technical debt and trade offs in business terms and facilitating pragmatic decisions between short term delivery and long term maintainability. Cover how to identify types of technical debt, build business cases for refactoring or infrastructure work, negotiate allocation of sprint capacity, quantify risks, and track debt reduction over time. Also include communication techniques to help product and engineering stakeholders understand the technical and business consequences of deferring technical work while preserving team health.
Problem Solving and Ambiguity Handling
Evaluates how candidates approach ill defined problems, make decisions with incomplete information, and continue progress under uncertainty. Topics include structuring ambiguous problems into hypotheses, performing rapid experiments and lightweight investigations, prioritizing next best steps, making trade off decisions between speed and confidence, using instrumentation and logs to validate assumptions, and communicating risks and unknowns to stakeholders. Candidates should demonstrate frameworks for triage, mitigation strategies, and examples where they preserved momentum while reducing risk.