Interview Library
Visit our growing library of Technical Interview questions covering subjects such as Python, Core Java, Quality Assurance, and more.
1. What are some differences between an Interface Class and an Abstract Class?
2. How does output caching work in ASP.NET?
3. What is connection pooling and how do you make your application use it?
4. What is serialization, how it works in .NET?
5. What is Viewstate?
6. What is Response.Redirect?
7. What is Server.Transfer?
8. What is Server.Execute?
1. Which symbol is used to declare a pointer?
2. Which symbol is used to reference a pointer?
3. Adding to a pointer that points to an array will
4. In C, the end of a string is marked by:
5. When does a segmentation fault occur?
6. What does the expression sizeof(int) refer to:
7. What is the proper declaration of a pointer?
8. What command would you use to get the memory address of integer variable a?
9. What command would you use to get the memory address of a pointer a?
10. What command would you use to get the value stored in pointer a?
11. What are the uses of the keyword static?
12. What does the keyword const mean?
13. What does the keyword volatile mean? Give three different examples of its use.
1. What is the implicit name of the parameter passed into a property’s ’set’ method?
2. Does C# support multiple inheritance?
3. When you inherit a protected class-level variable, who is it available to?
4. Are private class-level variables inherited?
5. Describe the accessibility modifier protected internal.
6. What’s the top .NET class that everything is derived from?
7. How’s method overriding different from overloading?
8. What does the keyword virtual mean in the method definition?
9. Can you declare the override method static while the original method is non-static?
10. Can you prevent your class from being inherited and becoming a base class for some other classes?
11. Can you allow class to be inherited, but prevent the method from being over-ridden?
12. When do you absolutely have to declare a class as abstract (as opposed to free-willed educated choice or decision based on UML diagram)?
13. What’s an interface class?
14. Can you inherit multiple interfaces?
15. And if they have conflicting method names?
16. What’s the difference between an interface and abstract class?
17. How can you overload a method?
18. If a base class has a bunch of overloaded constructors, and an inherited class has another bunch of overloaded constructors, can you enforce a call from an inherited constructor to an arbitrary base constructor?
19. What’s the difference between System.String and System.StringBuilder classes?
1. When would you choose to explicitly call a Destructor?
2. How you can distinguish between the pre-increment and post-increment overloaded operators?
3. Name at least three of the cast operators in C++?
4. If you had to explain Polymorphism to your grandmother, would type of example could you give so that she would understand it?
5. Why does STL avoid polymorphism?
6. How does STL achieve an alternative to polymorphism?
7. In an inheritance hierarchy with virtual functions, how many v-tables are there?
8. What is the C++ implementation of a “smart pointer”?
9. What is a Virtual Constructor?
10. Which Container is most efficient for random insertions and deletions?
11. What are the 5 different kinds of Iterators?
12. How can you achieve the same functionality of Operator Overloading without actually using operator overloading?
1. What are the two outputs created as a result of generation of a map?
2. What is the difference between physical map and symbolic map?
3. How do you use extended attributes?
4. What are the 3 working storage fields used for every field on the map?
5. What is MDT? What are FSET, FRSET?
6. What is the difference between a PF key & a PA key?
7. How is the storage determined in the symbolic map, if you have multiple maps?
8. What are the steps you go through to a create a BMS executable?
9. When you compile a CICS program, the (pre)compiler puts an extra chunk of code. Where does it get included and that is it called? What is its length?
10. List all the CICS tables and explain their contents.
11. In which table would you make an entry for a BMS map?
12. What is the content of the PPT entry?
13. For a CICS-DB2 program, how is the plan referenced?
14. How is dynamic memory allocated within a CICS application program?
15. What is trigger level in the context of TDQs?
16. What is ATI? What kind of TDQ can be used?
17. What is the use of DCT?
18. What is an ASRA abend?
19. What is an AEY9 abend?
20. What are the situations under which NEWCOPY is required?
21. How would you resolve an ASRA abend?
22. How do you rollback data written to an ESDS file?
1. Name the divisions in a COBOL program.
2. What are the different data types available in COBOL?
3. What does the INITIALIZE verb do?
4. What is 77 level used for?
5. What is 88 level used for?
6. What is level 66 used for?
7. What does the IS NUMERIC clause establish?
8. What is the difference between index and subscript?
9. What is the difference between SEARCH and SEARCH ALL?
10. What should be the sorting order for SEARCH ALL?
11. What is binary search?
12. How do you define a sort file in JCL that runs the COBOL program?
13. What is the difference between performing a SECTION and a PARAGRAPH?
14. What is the use of EVALUATE statement?
15. What is a scope terminator? Give examples.
16. When would you use in-line perform?
17. What is the difference between CONTINUE & NEXT SENTENCE ?
18. What do you do to resolve SOC-7 error?
19. How is sign stored in Packed Decimal fields and Zoned Decimal fields?
20. How is sign stored in a comp-3 field?
21. How is sign stored in a COMP field ?
22. What is the difference between COMP & COMP-3 ?
23. What is COMP-1? COMP-2?
24. How do you define a variable of COMP-1? COMP-2?
25. How many bytes does a S9(7) COMP-3 field occupy ?
26. What is COMP SYNC?
27. What is the mode in which you will OPEN a file for writing?
28. In the JCL, how do you define the files referred to in a subroutine ?
29. What is file status 92?
30. What is file status 39 ?
31. What is Static,Dynamic linking ?
32. What compiler option would you use for dynamic linking?
33. What is SSRANGE, NOSSRANGE ?
34. How do you set a return code to the JCL from a COBOL program?
35. How can you submit a job from COBOL programs?
36. What are the steps you go through while creating a COBOL program executable?
1. What is the difference between constructor and method?
2. What is casting?
3. What are different types of access modifiers?
4. How can you call Garbage Collection explicitly?
5. What is a Transient Modifier?
6. What is a Volatile Modifier?
7. What are inner class and anonymous class?
8. What is the difference between String and String Buffer?
9. What is the difference between Array and Vector?
10. What is the difference between process and thread?
11. What are the states associated in the thread?
12. What are Vector, Hashtable, LinkedList and Enumeration?
13. What is the difference between set and list?
14. What is the life cycle of a servlet?
1. How do you find the maximum value in a column in db2?
2. What are aggregate functions?
3. What is the use of VALUE function?
4. What is UNION and UNION ALL?
5. What is the restriction on using UNION in embedded SQL?
6. In the WHERE clause what is BETWEEN and IN?
7. What is ‘LIKE’ used for in WHERE clause?
8. How would you retrieve rows from a DB2 table in embedded SQL?
9. How do you specify and use a cursor in a COBOL program?
10. What happens when you say OPEN CURSOR?
11. How do you leave the cursor open after issuing a COMMIT? (for DB2 2.3 or above only .
12. What is DCLGEN ?
13. What are the contents of a DCLGEN?
14. How can you quickly find out the # of rows updated after an update statement?
15. What is EXPLAIN?
16. What do you need to do before you do EXPLAIN?
17. Where is the output of EXPLAIN stored?
18. How do you do the EXPLAIN of a dynamic SQL statement?
19. What are the different types of isolation levels?
20. What is the difference between CS and RR isolation levels?
21. When do you specify the isolation level?
22. What are the various locking levels available?
23. How does DB2 determine what lock-size to use?
24. What is lock escalation?
25. What are the various locks available?
26. What is ALTER ?
27. What is ACQUIRE/RELEASE in BIND?
28. What else is there in the PLAN apart from the access path?
29. What are PACKAGES ?
30. What are the advantages of using a PACKAGE?
31. What is a collection?
32. When is the access path determined for dynamic SQL? –
33. Suppose I have a program which uses a dynamic SQL and it has been performing well till now. Lately, though, I find that the performance has deteriorated. What might of happened?
34. How does DB2 store NULL physically?
35. How do you retrieve the data from a nullable column?
36. What is RUNSTATS?
37. When will you chose to run RUNSTATS?
38. Give some example of statistics collected during RUNSTATS?
39. What is REORG? When is it used?
40. What is IMAGECOPY ?
41. When do you use the IMAGECOPY?
42. What is COPY PENDING status?
43. What is CHECK PENDING ?
44. What is QUIESCE?
45. What is a clustered index ?
46. What is the difference between primary key & unique index ?
47. What is sqlcode -922 ?
48. What is an inner join, and an outer join ?
49. What are simple, segmented and partitioned table spaces ?
50. What is filter factor?
51. What is index cardinality?
52. What is a synonym ?
53. What is the difference between SYNONYM and ALIAS?
54. What are the disadvantages of using VARCHAR?
1. The Sun Java Center has classified design patterns in three tiers. Can you name them?
2. Name the presentation tier patterns:
3. Name the business tier patterns:
4. Name the Integration tier patterns:
5. Please tell me the definition of the following:
Factory Method
Singleton
Abstract Factory
Builder
Adapter
Proxy
Memento
1. What is the difference between a null and void pointer?
2. What is the minimum number of keys contained in each non root node of a b-tree of order 11?
3. If you are using C language to implement the heterogeneous linked list, what pointer type will you use?
4. What is the data structure that is used to perform recursion?
5. What are the methods available in storing sequential files?
6. What is the minimum number of queues needed to implement the priority queue?
7. What method is used to place a value onto the top of a stack?
8. What member function places a new node at the end of the linked list?
1. What is Lazy Fetching?
2. What is Component Mapping?
3. What is the difference between sorted and ordered collection in hibernate?
4. How do you create a primary key using hibernate?
5. What is the difference between Hibernate and Spring?
6. What is Hibernate proxy?
7. What is SessionFactory interface?
8. What is Configuration interface?
9. How can the mapping files be configured in Hibernate?
10. What happens when both hibernate.properties and hibernate.cfg.xml are in the classpath?
11. How do you set Hibernate to log all generated SQL to the console?
12. How can Hibernate be configured to access a instance variable directly and not through a setter method?
13. How can you make a property be read from the database but not modified in anyway (make it immutable)?
1. How would you create a button with rounded edges?
2. What is the difference between the ‘Font’ and ‘FontMetrics’ class?
3. Explain how to render an HTML page using only Swing
4. How would you detect a keypress in a JComboBox?
5. Why would you use SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait or SwingUtilities.invokeLater?
6. If your UI seems to freeze periodically, what might be a likely reason?
7. Which Swing methods are thread-safe?
8. Why won’t the JVM terminate when I close all the application windows?
9. How do you create your own JTable TableModel?
10. Which containers use a border Layout as their default layout?
11. What is the preferred size of a component?
12. What method is used to specify a container’s layout?
13. Which containers use a FlowLayout as their default layout?
14. What are the restrictions imposed by a Security Manager on Applets?
15. What is the relationship between an event-listener interface and an event-adapter class?
16. How can a GUI component handle its own events?
17. What is the difference between the paint(. and repaint(. methods?
18. What are invisible components?
19. What is the default layout for a ContentPane in JFC?
1. If automating – what is your process for determining what to automate and in what order?
2. What do you include in a test plan?
3. How do you scope, organize, and execute a test project
4. Describe the difference between validation and verification.
5. What are the properties of a good requirement?
6. What kinds of software testing have you done?
7. How do you determine what to test?
8. How do you decide when you have ‘tested enough’?
9. Describe the basic elements that you put in a defect report?
10. How do you analyze your test results? What metrics do you try to provide?
11. Realizing you won’t be able to test everything – how do you decide what to test first?
12. How do you go about testing a web application?
13. Describe a few reasons that a bug might not be fixed.
14. What are the possible states of a software bug’s life cycle?
15. Describe a time when you had to meet a difficult deadline. What steps did you take to succeed?
16. Define the steps you take to break a use case down into its associated test artifacts.
17. Define the difference between defect severity versus defect priority.
1. Which attribute is each Action Element uniquely identified by?
2. How is the name of the Application Resources file is set?
3. How do you force a validating XML parser to be used?
4. How can you specify that an ActionMapping be used when a request doesn’t match any other mapping?
5. If you have created a custom ActionMapping subclass with the property “service”, how can you then initialize the value to “selectRecord”?
6. What does the tag do?
7. How do you localize Tiles?
8. How do you localize Validator forms?
1. Which runlevel will reboot the system?
2. What command would be used to view all but the first seven lines of the similar.log file?
3. What is the default subnet mask for a network beginning with 216?
4. What authentication method does telnet use when the user is attempting to log on to a remote host?
5. You are late for a meeting. You need to start the qwerty utility before heading to the meeting so it will run for the next few hours and compile weekly system usage results. Currently, you are logged in as a regular user, but the qwerty script requires root permission to run. How should you execute the script?
6. What protocol does ping utilize to bounce packets?
7. Which configuration file is used to identify where system log messages are recorded?
8. You want users to be able to download files through anonymous FTP and do nothing further. What access should they have in the directory they will access?
9. You want to extract an archive from a tape. The archive was created using tar, and you want to copy all the contents from the tape back to the system. What option must you use with tar to accomplish this?
10. By default, which protocol runs at port 110?
11. For legacy reasons, a huge file must be copied on a floppy to be transferred to another machine. What command can be used to make a file fill more than one floppy?
12. What variable can you echo, in BASH, to see the PID of the last jobs started?
13. Which utility can be used to list modules, remove modules, and add modules?
14. You are in the empty directory “abcd” and you give the command touch abcd. What will the result of this command be?
15. With a umask value of 012, what are the default permissions assigned to newly created files?
16. A process with a PID number of 9876 has entered runaway mode. You have tried to remove it with a standard kill command, but it will not go away. What other kill command can you use to be assured the process will terminate?
17. Let’s assume that you accidentally started a job that consumes a great deal of resources. You feel that this has the possibility of negatively affecting how other jobs run on the system. Which command can you use to alter the priority level of this job?
18. The fsck utility has found a number of corrupted files and you have chosen to correct the filesystem. To which directory are the corrupted files written?
19. Which ports, by default, are used by the SNMP protocol?
20. You want to find all the three-letter files in the current directory that end with the letter y. What command should you use?
1. What is the difference between a System Use Case vs. a Business Use Case?
2. What is the difference between Functional and Non-Functional Requirements, and can you please provide an example of each?
3. Are Use Cases the functional requirements, or do you think that functional requirements are different from Use Cases?
4. What types of requirements should not be documented in Use Cases?
5. What criteria do you use to indicate the Use Case specification is complete and/or correct?
6. What’s the relationship between Use Cases and Test Cases?
7. Should technology be documented in a Use Case Specification?