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Discovery Interview Questions

To better understand team and their context before onboarding them to an Internal Developer Platform, this guide contains some questions to cover various aspects of their work.

This template is inspired from this blog post and template and may diverge based on learnings:

Warm-up

  • What is your team responsible for?
  • What is your role on the team?

Asking questions

This should take around 50 minutes

At this point the interviewer should begin asking questions from the pre-defined list. If there are answers that need more detail or clarification, the interviewer should probe further and ask follow up questions.

Current Environment

  • Can you give us a tour of your development environment, and tools and services you use?
  • What does your local development environment look like?

Planning and defining work

This may be skipped depending on the value of asking these questions.

  • When you start to work on a new project, what’s the first step you take in planning it?
    • What do you do after accomplishing that?
  • Think back to the last time you took on a new project. How did you identify the requirements?

Development - New applications

  • When was the last time you created a new application?
    • What were the steps you followed in order to create that application?
    • How long did it take to get the application up and running?
    • How often do you do this?

Development - Existing applications

  • What current applications are you working on?
    • What were the steps you followed to get your environment set up?
  • Have you worked on other applications?
    • What was the last application you worked on before this one?
    • What was it like to switch from working on that last application to the current one?

Development - Debugging

  • What was a recent difficult bug that you encountered?
    • How did you go about debugging it?
    • Where you able to do so locally?
  • How do you debug production issues?
  • Have you logged into production servers or accessed production databases to fix issues?
    • If so, tell me about the last time you did that. What production services did you need to access?

Running your services

  • Where do you get your signals from when a service is impaired or unavailable?
  • How do you know if your services are healthy?
  • How do you measure performance?
    • Do you use Software Delivery Performance metrics like DORA (others?)

Testing

  • How do you test or validate your work locally?
  • How do you test your changes in combination with other developers changes?
  • How do you know a change is ready to be deployed to production?
  • How long do you usually spend building tests for your changes?
  • How long usually do your tests take to run?
  • What type of changes are the hardest to test or take the longest?

Security

  • How do you guard against security vulnerabilities in your code?
  • Does your service handle any GPDR or other sensitive data?
  • If you were to pretend to be a hacker for a moment, in what ways would you attack your services?
    • What information, or access, could you imagine that you could get?

Wrap-up

This should take around 5 minutes.

The interviewer should wrap up the conversation by thanking the customer for participating in the interview.

If there are follow-up items, the interviewer should confirm that we’ll be in touch to dive deeper on those areas when the time is convenient for the customer. At this point, the interview is finished, and the interviewer should end the session.