Interview Q/A

This is an important software engineering interview question that is often asked in interviews. Some of the software development challenges are: -

• The rapid advancement of technology: Technology evolves at a phenomenal pace, thus, exerting pressure on software developers to learn and adapt to maintain competitiveness.
• Increasing demands of customers: Different customers have different needs. Software developers must understand the business concept to understand the software requirements of the customers.
• Time constraints: Software developers need to work under strict time deadlines. For remote software developers, the challenge is even bigger as they straddle timezones. Time constraints can reduce the efficiency of software developers and end in mediocre quality software products.
• Limited resources: Many software development companies still struggle with a lack of IT resources such as high-performing software development tools, robust computing platforms, incompetent data storage, and inefficient network capabilities. All these can reduce the overall efficiency and performance of the software development team.
• Disagreements with software testing teams: Software development and software testing teams are often at loggerheads with each other. Major reasons for the same are the difference in team mindsets and job roles, the opposite nature of development and testing, and high work and performance pressure.
• Coping with legacy systems: Many organizations still run with older legacy systems and this can raise the risk of security, inefficiency, and lack of technological compatibility. Thus, the modernization of legacy software is a pressing need.
• Heterogeneity challenge: Since customer demands evolve constantly, an advanced challenge in software development is to create flexible and dependable software that can adapt to changing and future needs.

Functional and object-oriented programming are both used in software development. Here are the differences between them: While functional programming uses and depends on mathematical functions, object-oriented programming depends on object classes that are closely related to the functions. In functional programming, one works only with functions. In object-oriented programming, one can store functions inside objects. The languages functional programming supports are Python, Javascript, Scala, and Haskell. The languages object-oriented programming supports are Python, Java, C++, Lisp, and Perl.

These are two types of acceptance tests. - **Alpha test**: Alpha tests are tests where the customer assesses a full-version software under the developer’s supervision. This kind of testing happens at the developer’s site. - **Beta test**: Beta tests are tests where the customer assesses a version of the software without the developer’s supervision. This kind of testing happens at the customer’s site.

The three types of static testing tools are:

• Code-based: For these testing tools, the source code functions as the input and they use that to generate the test cases.
• Specialized: In these testing tools, the language is used to write detailed test specifications for every test case.
• Requirement-based: These testing tools design the test cases as per the user requirements. For such a question in the software developer interview, remember to add instances from personal experience.