Spring Interview Questions for Developers

Spring is a Java-based back-end framework popular for its modular architecture, feature-rich dependency injection, and comprehensive ecosystem with projects like Spring Boot, Spring Security, and Spring Data.

According to the CoderPad 2023 Developer survey, Spring is the 2nd most in-demand back-end framework among technical recruiters and hiring managers.

To evaluate the Spring expertise of developers during coding interviews, below you’ll find hands-on coding challenges and interview questions.

Additionally, we have outlined a set of suggested practices to ensure that your interview questions accurately measure the candidates’ Spring skillset.

Spring example question

Create a Spring CRUD API

The goal of this exercise is to retrieve data from an external source, store it in an appropriate database structure, and create a CRUD RESTful API to interface with the database

Goals

1. Read the data from this graphql endpoint: https://swapi-graphql.netlify.app/.netlify/functions/index with the following query:

query Query {allPlanets{planets{name population terrains climates}}}

(You can view the shape of the data here.)

2. Store the data from the graphql endpoint into the database and create appropriate models

3. Write RESTful Create, Read, Update, and Delete endpoints to interact with the database

Interview best practices for Spring roles

For successful Spring interviews, it’s important to consider various factors, such as the candidate’s experience level and the engineering role. To ensure that your Spring interview questions yield the best results, we recommend following these best practices when working with candidates:

• Create technical questions that align with actual business cases within your organization. This will not only be more engaging for the candidate but also enable you to better assess the candidate’s suitability for your team.
• Encourage the candidate to ask questions during the interview and foster a collaborative environment.
• Make sure your Spring candidates are familiar with using application servers like Apache Tomcat, JBoss, or WebLogic.
• Verify that the candidate has a minimal knowledge of all the different Spring layers (Core Container, Data Access/Integration, Web, AOP and Instrumentation, …).

Additionally, adhering to standard interview etiquette when conducting Spring interviews is essential. This includes adjusting the question complexity to the candidate’s level of development skills, providing timely feedback to candidates about their application status, and allowing candidates to ask questions about the assessment or working with you and your team.