Software Development Lifecycle and Tradeoffs Questions

Covers fundamental software development lifecycle concepts and the technical tradeoffs made during product development. Topics include the lifecycle phases of requirements gathering and analysis, design, implementation and development, testing, deployment, and maintenance, and awareness of different lifecycle models such as waterfall, agile and scrum, and iterative development. Also covers practical engineering techniques and tradeoffs such as feature flags, split testing, blue green deployments, canary releases, technical debt, and how decisions affect velocity quality and maintainability. Emphasis is on understanding how individual engineering work fits into the broader process and how to reason about tradeoffs between speed cost scalability and code quality.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Explain GitOps and design a simple GitOps workflow for teams deploying to Kubernetes. Include repository organization (infra vs apps), how to trigger deployments (push vs operator), handling drift detection and reconciliation, and approval policies. Compare tradeoffs against imperative pipelines and describe how you would manage secrets safely in a GitOps model.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Design an end-to-end secure CI/CD pipeline to reduce software supply-chain risk. Cover secret management, ephemeral build credentials, artifact signing and verification, SBOM generation and attestation, and how to enforce verification at deployment time. Explain how this integrates with GitOps-based deployments and tradeoffs between developer friction and security guarantees.

HardSystem Design

0 practiced

You are tasked with migrating a large legacy monolith into microservices with minimal regression risk. Outline a migration plan: domain decomposition strategy (strangler fig), CI/CD changes required to support many small services, feature toggle strategy for cutover, incremental database approach, and how to run parallel systems during the transition. Include testing, observability, and rollback strategies for each migration step.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You're the platform lead: cycle time has increased, production bugs are rising, and on-call load is high. Propose a measurable program to quantify technical debt across teams, prioritize remediation (quick wins vs long-term work), and rebalance velocity without compromising SLAs. Include the metrics you would collect, a triage and ownership model, and how you would demonstrate ROI to product and leadership.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You deployed a release that breaks interactions between services that coordinate via events (eventual consistency). Rolling back one service alone leaves inconsistent state because the other service already processed the new events. Propose a rollback and remediation strategy that accounts for data reconciliation, out-of-order events, and minimizing customer-visible errors. Include considerations for compensating actions and runbooks.

Unlock Full Question Bank

Get access to hundreds of Software Development Lifecycle and Tradeoffs interview questions and detailed answers.

Join thousands of developers preparing for their dream job.