Testing Debugging and Instrumentation Questions

Testing strategies and observability practices for software and hardware systems, including embedded contexts. Topics include unit testing, integration testing, hardware in the loop testing, test harnesses, test automation, and trade offs when testing resource constrained systems. Instrumentation covers logging design, metrics, tracing, telemetry, and debug interfaces that make systems observable in development and production. Debugging techniques include use of debuggers, serial logging, signal capture, oscilloscope traces, remote debugging, and structured troubleshooting workflows. Discuss design decisions that balance visibility against performance and safety requirements, how to make systems testable and instrumented from the start, and how to interpret instrumentation to localize faults and validate fixes.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Describe techniques for remote debugging of embedded devices deployed in the field that intermittently fail, such as a memory leak causing eventual reboot. Discuss serial logging, circular buffers, remote core dumps, gdbserver, and sampling-based heap profiling. For each technique explain benefits, costs (bandwidth/storage), and safe triggers.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

List practical techniques to make a service more testable from an SRE perspective (for example: dependency injection, abstractions for external calls, deterministic time sources, feature flags). For each technique give a short example showing how it reduces flakiness or lowers the cost of debugging in CI and production.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Propose a CI/CD pipeline stage sequence for a microservice including: unit tests, integration tests, HIL or hardware tests (if applicable), canary deployment, canary analysis, and automated rollback. Provide an example of how to structure these stages (e.g., Jenkinsfile or GitHub Actions conceptual steps), artifact handling, and timeouts for each stage.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Behavioral/Leadership: As an SRE principal you discover that multiple teams are shipping services without basic instrumentation and incidents are taking hours to debug. Draft a multi-quarter strategy to improve instrumentation coverage across the org: hiring/training, low-friction tooling changes, incentives (OKRs), review gates, and metrics to show progress. Discuss risks and how you would mitigate stakeholder pushback.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design an automated deployment pipeline that integrates SLO monitoring and canary analysis to automatically rollback if risk to SLOs exceeds a threshold. Define how the risk score is computed in real time, where the analysis runs, how to aggregate multiple SLO signals, and how to prevent cascading rollbacks across services with interdependencies.

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