IntermediateBEHAVIORAL
Tell me about a time you inherited a poorly structured full-stack codebase (both frontend and backend). How did you assess the situation, prioritize what to fix first, and communicate trade-offs to your team or manager?
Full Stack Developer
General

Sample Answer

At a SaaS startup, I inherited a React/Node/Express/MongoDB app with duplicated logic, no tests, and 2–3 production incidents per week. Situation: features took 3x longer than estimated and deploys were risky. Task: stabilize the codebase while keeping roadmap delivery. Action: in week one I ran static analysis (ESLint, SonarQube), added logging, and mapped hotspots by error rate and change frequency. I prioritized: (1) fixing a brittle auth flow causing 40% of support tickets, (2) extracting shared services (API client, form validation), and (3) introducing a testing safety net (Jest + Cypress) for the most-used flows. I proposed a 20% “engineering health” budget to my manager and demoed weekly risk reduction. Result: incidents dropped 70%, average lead time fell from 10 to 4 days, and support tickets for auth dropped 60% in two sprints.

Keywords

Used metrics (error rate, change frequency, support tickets) to prioritize refactorsIntroduced tests and tooling (ESLint, SonarQube, Jest, Cypress) for stabilityNegotiated explicit time budget with manager for engineering healthQuantified impact: 70% incident reduction and 60% fewer auth tickets
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