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.
Code Quality and Technical Debt Management
Covers practices for writing readable, maintainable, and correct code and for managing long term code health. Topics include error handling, automated and manual testing, code review practices, refactoring and optimization, style and readability, continuous improvement, identification and quantification of technical debt, prioritization of pay down activities versus feature delivery, and measuring the impact of remediation efforts. Candidates should be able to explain decision criteria for when refactoring is worth the investment and how to institutionalize improvements.
Scripting and Problem Solving
Evaluate the candidate ability to write clear, maintainable automation scripts and to solve practical programming problems that arise when building and debugging tests. Topics include writing readable functions and modules, correct control flow, basic algorithmic reasoning for test tasks, handling errors and edge cases, asynchronous programming patterns and synchronization concerns, logging and debugging techniques such as using breakpoints and interpreting stack traces, writing small unit tests for helpers, refactoring for reuse, and applying clean code principles so automation code is easy to maintain and understand. Interviewers assess both correctness and the candidate ability to reason about testability, reliability, and maintainability rather than advanced algorithmic knowledge.