Sunday, October 7, 2012

Interview Questions for Build & Release Engineer

If you are preparing for an interview as Build & Release engineer position, you are reading the right blog. I received an email from a reader yesterday about it, therefore I decided to write down some questions.

During my 6 years of B&R experience, I have learnt that tools used for CM, Build management and scripting vary a lot in different corporations. You might be using InstallShield for deployment in one company and a simple MSBuild script in another. As a build & Release engineer you must master at least one scripting language- Perl, MSBuild or Shell. That is really helpful even if you are not currently working on any of these.

Regarding interview questions, I can think of following-
  • How do your handle upgrade scenario in InstallShield wizard? How can you prevent a product being downgraded while installation.
  • Can you write a custom action in VB/C# and integrate it with Installshield wizard?
  • How do you implement Continuous Integration using CruiseControl?
  • What are the things you change on your target system while deploying?
  • How can we migrate from one CM tool to another, say SVN to TFS?
  • Which one is a better Build Management tool- CruiseControl or Hudson? Why?
Please feel free to drop me a mail regarding any of these questions. Good Luck.