Sample verbal interview questions

During acquisition, verbal interviews are an opportunity to clarify the technical approach described in a contractor’s proposal. (In the federal context, they are different from oral presentations under FAR Part 15 and do not permit a contractor to amend or change their proposal.)

Draw from the following questions to get details that will help you evaluate a vendor’s experience with modern software development practices. Ask clarifying questions about a vendor’s answers, either to reveal more information pertinent to a project or to explain an answer that seems odd.

Engineering

Talk about your process for determining which software and programming languages the development team would use to build the software, and explain the rationale for choosing those languages.
What is your technology stack of choice for this project? Why? Which technology stacks does this particular team have the most experience with? What other stacks or technologies is the team experienced with?
Describe your technical development and collaboration process. Please specify your approach to version control, testing (and test-driven development), accessibility, and continuous integration and continuous deployment.
Discuss the technical decisions you’ve made in your proposal and any questions they raise for this project.
How will you approach technical oversight? How would you track the standards described in the quality expectations (or QASP)?
How would you identify deep problems within a code base? How would you address those problems to reduce technical debt? What types of re-factoring strategies would you consider?
What do you anticipate as the largest risks in back-end development?
How do you intend to address data security needs and requirements?
Tell us about a time you came into the middle of a development effort. What challenges did you face? How did you overcome them? How do you envision integrating yourself within the existing development effort?
Please describe your technical lead’s experience with [name of programming language].
Tell us about a system you built on top of some infrastructure- or platform-as-a-service.
Tell us about an infrastructure problem that you helped solve, such as slow application performance, unexpected downtime, a security breach, etc. What was the problem and how did you solve it?

Collaboration

How would you ensure good communication within the team and with government partners?
How do you see the designers and developers interacting as you build the product?
How would you like the [agency] to be involved as you design and build the product?
What activities do you plan on engaging in to build and ensure strong collaboration among the team?
How can you ensure that the various members of your team coordinate and collaborate across functions during performance and delivery?
How do you typically communicate your findings and strategic recommendations to a client? How do you frame findings that might challenge your client’s assumptions?
Have you ever worked with a remote or distributed team before?
If yes: What tools and/or mechanisms have you used to help promote open dialogue and foster communication on the team? How have you overcome communication challenges and barriers?
If no: What challenges do you anticipate? What do you think you'll need to succeed?

Staffing

If awarded the contract, how would you quickly staff your design and/or development team?
Tell us more about the different team roles you envision for this project.

Research and design

How do you plan to address the needs of the multiple user groups for this product?
How have you incorporated changes into projects based on user research?
What do you think are the most important features that users will interact with in the system?
How would you design a usability test for an iteration of this product? What participants would you recruit? What tasks would you test? How would you analyze the results?
How would you go about identifying a visual feel and content tone for the project?
How would you bring the full team and stakeholders into the research and synthesis process?
What is your experience with usability testing?
Describe a time when user research findings disproved a team’s assumption on one of your projects. What was the situation? What did you do? What did you learn?

Product and strategy

What do you think are the most important risks for this project and how will you help [agency name] mitigate them?
What do you need from the government product owner to make this project succeed?
How will you help develop the product vision and prioritize features for development? How will you approach the process of prioritizing features to build throughout the project?
Tell us about a project you led that was particularly challenging or complex. How did you approach it? How did it work out?
How would you handle a request from the agency for a feature that you don’t think is needed?

Iterative development

Describe the agile project management practices and tools you would use for estimating, planning, and managing risk, and for team collaboration and communicating status. Why use them in particular?
How will you keep developers, designers, and researchers engaged in building features to fulfill a user story without having to extend a sprint or rely on a waterfall development process?
How will the development team interact with the government product owner to ensure sprints are sized reasonably for the development team?
If the team encounters a task that requires more work than originally anticipated and that can’t be completed in the current sprint, how would you alert the government product owner?
Tell me about your experience with agile software development or other iterative development styles. How does practicing agile affect the technical choices you make?