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.
HardSystem Design
82 practiced
Design a progressive delivery platform that supports automated canary and A/B rollouts across a fleet of 50 microservices, with per-service metric-based gating, automated rollback, per-tenant targeting, audit logs for every rollout, and integration with CI and feature-flag systems. The platform should handle 10,000 deploys per day across clusters and provide low-latency flag evaluation. Describe the high-level architecture, control plane vs data plane separation, data flows for metrics and audit logs, and how gating decisions are both computed and enforced.
HardTechnical
60 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.
MediumTechnical
88 practiced
Compare the strategies of rebuilding container images separately for each environment versus promoting a single immutable image artifact from dev -> staging -> prod. Discuss traceability, reproducibility, vulnerability scanning, and operational simplicity. Recommend an approach and describe how to implement artifact promotion in CI/CD.
EasyTechnical
63 practiced
Explain what feature flags (feature toggles) are, the main categories (release toggles, experiment toggles, ops toggles), and the operational problems they solve. You're introducing a risky backend feature in a mature product: list concrete steps you would take using feature flags to reduce customer impact, including rollout plan and kill-switch procedure, and how you'd measure success.
EasyTechnical
89 practiced
Compare blue/green, canary, and rolling update deployment strategies. Given a service that requires near-zero downtime but the team has limited budget and limited capacity to run duplicate environments, which strategy would you choose and why? Explain tradeoffs in terms of infrastructure cost, rollback speed, deployment risk, complexity, and observability needs.
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