Some hints and tips I can give you are
High level questions on 3-tier MVC architectures and awareness of the high level components. Knowledge and good understanding in full software development life cycle (SDLC) and agile development methodologies like XP, TDD, FDD, RUP etc. Situation, Action and Results (i.e SAR) types of questions to evaluate your skills in Planning and Organization, Professionalism,Team work, Managing Performance and interpersonal skills.System integration experience and skills e.g. SOAP Webservices, Message Oriented Middleware, SOA etc. An example on SAR:
Q: Describe a time when you were faced with a stressful situation that demonstrated your coping skills? Give me an example of a time when you used your fact finding skills to solve a problem? Describe a time when you applied your analytical and/or problem solving skills? FAQ
A: Situation: When you were working for the Surething insurance corporation pty ltd, you were responsible for the migration of an online insurance application (i.e. external website) to a newer version of application server (i.e. the current version is no longer supported by the vendor). The migration happened smoothly and after a couple of days of going live, you started to experience �OutOfMemoryError�, which forced you to restart the application server every day. This raised a red alert and the immediate and the senior management were very concerned and consequently constantly calling for meetings and updates on the progress of identifying the root cause of this issue. This has created a stressful situation.
Action: You were able to have a positive outlook by believing that this is more of a challenge as opposed to think of it as a stressful situation. You needed to be composed to get your analytical and problem solving skills to get to work. You spent some time finding facts relating to �OutOfMemoryError� (Refer Q74 in Java section). You were tempted to increase the heap space as suggested by fellow developers but the profiling and monitoring did not indicate that was the case. The memory usage drastically increased during and after certain user operations like generating PDF reports. The generation of reports used some third party libraries, which dynamically generated classes from your templates. So you decided to increase the area of the memory known as the �perm�, which sits next to the heap. This �perm� space is consumed when the classes are dynamically generated from templates during the report generation.
java -XX permSize=256M -XX:MaxPermSize=256M
Results: After you have increased the �perm� size, the �OutOfMemoryError� has disappeared. You kept monitoring it for a week and everything worked well. The management was impressed with your problem solving, fact finding and analytical skills, which had contributed to the identification of the not so prevalent root cause and the effective communication with the other teams like infrastructure, production support, senior management, etc. The management also identified your ability to cope under stress and offered you a promotion to lead a small team of 4 developers.
[ February 25, 2008: Message edited by: arulk pillai ]
[ February 25, 2008: Message edited by: arulk pillai ]
