Technical Architect Interview Questions – Part 2

Following is the list of questions that were discussed by me with some of the guys appearing for the position of technical lead or architect, in last few months. Please feel free to share your opinion on them.

Architecture

• Define the roles and responsibilities of technical architect, application architect, solution architect and an enterprise architect?
  The reason I asked this question was that the interviewee ended up mentioning all of these roles while introducing himself. And, while answering the question, he was unable to clearly define these roles. As an advice, please take care of mentioning about your role when attending the interview for the role of an architect.
• For a new web application project, would you still recommend a traditional MVC based approach? What may the technology stack look like for a new web application which can as well be ported quickly to work on mobile devices?
• How is the recent turmoil in Javascript world with frameworks such as Angular, Knockout, Emberetc, would impact the overall architecture of upcoming web applications?
• Define REST by describing Representation State Transfer? Interestingly, I have found that many were not able to clearly define in terms of “Representation State Transfer”.

Code Quality

• It may be difficult to achieve high unit test coverage for a very long method. True or false? And, why?
• How would you go about refactoring a class file having 3000 lines of code?
• Mention top 5 code refactoring techniques you would want to suggest to your developers working on legacy code?
• What are different unit tests naming conventions you suggest to the developers?

Application Security

• Could you mention top 3 security vulnerabilities that you want to suggest developers to take care while they are doing design and development?

Cloud Applications

• Mention top 2-3 things for developers to watch out for when developing a cloud-ready applications?
• What are different cloud service models?
• Describe multi-tenancy with reference to Software-as-a-service (SAAS) cloud service model.