Sys Analysis — Interview questions
APIs & Protocols
API and protocol knowledge an analyst needs to write specs — HTTP structure and status codes, REST principles, API styles compared, data formats, and idempotency.
23 questions
Architecture & Documentation
Architecture awareness for an analyst — monolith vs microservices, HLD, documentation artifacts and diagrams a system needs, access-control models, and caching.
20 questions
Role & Behavioral Cases
The role and soft-skill cases every loop asks — systems vs business analyst, junior vs senior, proving the analyst's value, stakeholder conflict, unresponsive customers, and communicating constraints.
11 questions
Data Modeling & Storage
Data-modeling knowledge for an analyst — model levels, relational vs NoSQL, keys and constraints, indexes, normalization, transactions, ACID, and isolation anomalies.
14 questions
Database Scaling
How a data store scales and distributes — replication, sharding and shard-key choice, partitioning vs sharding, read replicas, denormalization, connection pooling, and CAP for databases.
9 questions
Estimation & Decomposition
How an analyst estimates delivery — hours vs story points, timeline estimation, planning poker and relative sizing, estimation under uncertainty, and POC vs MVP vs prototype.
6 questions
Integration Design
How an analyst designs system-to-system integrations — integration topologies and types, sync vs async, orchestration vs choreography, message brokers, and the integration design checklist.
17 questions
Messaging & Delivery Guarantees
Broker reliability and delivery semantics — Kafka vs RabbitMQ, partitions/offsets/consumer groups, delivery guarantees, idempotent consumers, dead-letter queues, the outbox and saga patterns, and ordering.
15 questions
Modeling & Notations
UML and BPMN modeling — diagram types and when to use them, BPMN elements and gateways, sequence diagrams, use cases vs user stories, and modeling notations.
20 questions
Requirements Prioritization
How an analyst ranks scope and cuts a backlog under constraints — MoSCoW, RICE, Kano, weighted scoring, cumulative voting, and resolving conflicting-stakeholder priority calls.
9 questions
Process & Methodologies
Delivery process knowledge for an analyst — Agile vs Waterfall, sprint ceremonies, SMART goals, and techniques for decomposing a backlog item.
22 questions
gRPC, GraphQL & Realtime
RPC and realtime transports an analyst chooses between — gRPC and Protobuf, GraphQL vs REST, WebSocket/SSE/long-polling, webhooks and their security, and correlation IDs.
13 questions
Requirements & Elicitation
Requirement types, quality criteria, elicitation techniques, the analyst role, and the requirement lifecycle from business need to verified delivery.
22 questions
Resilience & Scalability
Fault-tolerance and scale patterns an analyst specifies in NFRs — load balancing, circuit breaker, retry with backoff, bulkhead, graceful degradation, rate limiting, caching, and zero-downtime migration.
14 questions
Security & Access Control
Security an analyst must specify — OAuth2 grants, JWT structure and revocation, mTLS, TLS/HTTPS, symmetric vs asymmetric encryption, hashing, digital signatures, and token auth across microservices.
14 questions
SOAP & XML
The SOAP/XML stack an analyst still meets in enterprise integrations — SOAP message parts, WSDL, XSD, XML namespaces, XML vs JSON/HTML, JSON Schema, and SOAP faults.
12 questions
Specifications & Documentation
The documentation artifacts an analyst writes — SRS, ТЗ/ЧТЗ, ГОСТ 19/34, use-case flows, INVEST user stories, Gherkin acceptance criteria, DoR/DoD, and story splitting.
11 questions
SQL for Analysts
Query authoring an analyst is grilled on live — JOIN types, GROUP BY/HAVING, set operators, anti-joins and subqueries, views, window functions, and reading a broken query.
14 questions
Transactions & Isolation
Transaction and concurrency depth beyond ACID — isolation levels and the anomalies each permits, optimistic vs pessimistic locking, deadlocks, MVCC, 2PC vs saga, and data-layer idempotency.
8 questions
UML Diagrams
UML notation an analyst draws — the diagram taxonomy, class relationships and multiplicity, aggregation vs composition, state machines, use-case, activity and component diagrams.
12 questions
