Problem Decomposition and Incremental Development Questions

Covers the ability to break complex, ambiguous problems into smaller, well defined components and then implement solutions iteratively. Includes techniques for identifying root causes versus symptoms, structuring analysis frameworks appropriate to the problem type, and mapping dependencies and interfaces between components. Emphasizes starting with a simple working solution or prototype, validating each subcomponent, and progressively adding complexity while managing risk and integrating pieces. Candidates should demonstrate how they prioritize subproblems, estimate effort, choose trade offs, and use incremental testing and verification to ensure correctness and maintainability. This skill applies across algorithmic coding problems, system design, product or business case analysis, and case interview scenarios.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Design an incremental observability plan for a new microservice. Which metrics would you add first, what logs and spans would you capture, how would you set sampling and retention, and what dashboards/alerts would you create to help diagnose regressions during development and after each incremental release?

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

List common heuristics and decision criteria used to split a large codebase into services. For each heuristic (e.g., bounded context, scalability, release velocity, security boundary), give a short example and describe how you'd turn the heuristic into concrete signals for deciding whether a component should be extracted.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Plan a zero-downtime migration of user address data into a new schema for 100 million users. Decompose the migration into discovery, dual-write or change-data-capture, backfill with throttling, reconciliation, read versioning, monitoring, and rollback. Include specific validation queries and approaches to reconcile mismatches, and how to schedule and throttle to avoid DB overload.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

A social feed must handle both heavy reads and many writes (new posts). Propose a decomposition and architecture using approaches such as fan-out-on-write vs fan-out-on-read, materialized views, caching layers, and CQRS. Provide an incremental rollout plan to move from a simple implementation to a scalable architecture and the performance metrics you'd track at each stage.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

Design a dependency-mapping tool to visualize and reason about service and code dependencies to aid decomposition decisions. Define the data model (nodes, edges, metadata such as owners and SLAs), methods of data collection (static analysis, runtime tracing, build graphs), UI features for filtering and impact analysis, and an incremental roll-out plan to integrate into CI and on-call playbooks.

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