If you are reading my title “Java Interview Question Tips For Entry Level Developers”, I can consider that you are somewhere around 0-1 year of experience java developer. You might have studied 1 or 2 java books and skimmed few website to learn java and working in java project. When you claim that you know java and having few months to 1 year of experience, the interviewer expect you must be aware of following items as listed below. If you are faking during java interview, a smart java lead interviewer can catch you and from that point onward, you are out of the game.

Java Interview Question classified under different categories

1. Awareness About Java/JRE/JDK versions
2. Java major version feature difference
3. Java Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Eclipse, NetBenas etc
4. Debugging Awareness using IDE
5. Basic Java Questions (In Depth Knowledge and application development knowledge)
6. Advance Java Awareness (JDBC/Sprint/Hibernate etc)
7. JUnit Knowledge
8. Build Process (Jenkins/Maven/CI-Continuous Integration)
9. Code Quality Guidelines
10. PMD & Sonar Cube Reports
11. Basics
12. Explain your development process (waterfall or Agile)
13. Other tool and techniques used during development process

You should have a fair knowledge on all the above area and categories. Some people just prepare for java interview questions but fail to answers other questions and then get rejected.

Interview Question on Java/JRE/JDK versions awareness

Interviewer might ask any of the following question(s) during interview process to validate how attentive you are when using java as programming language . Answering below questions does not guarantee a success, but if you are not on the top of these question, there is a good chance that you will be rejected

1. Which version of Java (or JDK) you used in your project?
2. What is the current Version of Java?
3. Why is your project not working latest version of Java?
4. JRE and JDK are same, if not what is the difference?
5. If you have to install JDK 1.7 and 1.8 together, how can you do that?
6. Are you using Oracle JDK or any other implementation?
7. What is the Java Archive?
8. Can you explain what is JAR, WAR & EAR?
9. How do you make executable JAR?
10. What META-INF file contains?

Java Interview Question Tips about your current or favourite project

Not necessary that every interviewer has habit of asking from your current project but some senior folks who comes to interview candidate look into resume and ask questions from your current java project. If you fail to answer or satisfactory response, there is a good chance that either you would not make it or you will be declared as a mediocre candidate. I suggest to review below tips and evaluate how you can answer them, if not retrospect why you they look cryptic to you .

1. Can you explain your application architecture?
2. Do you have any document in your team which describe the application architecture?
3. Who has written the architecture document?
4. What all are different section your architecture document has?
5. How does logging work in your application?
6. Which Logging API your project is using?
7. How exception handling is done in your application?
8. Do you have any authentication mechanism in your application?
9. What kind of security framework is used?
10. How do you manage session in your application (assume it is web application)?
11. Which module or functionality you worked on?
12. How did you receive the functionality detail (via requirement document or SRS or functional specs etc)?
13. How did plan implementing
14. What coding guidelines you followed?
15. Who prepared that coding guideline in your project?
16. Do you have any JUnit coverage guideline?
17. What IDE you have used in your project?
18. Which static code analyser you have used?
19. What general issues you have noticed when you used static code analyzer in your project?
20. Who reviewed your code in your team?
21. What kind of code review issues have been received?
22. Why do you think code review is very important and how does it help?
23. Have you used any Java profiling tool?
24. What is the version control system in your application?
25. Do you follow any branching strategy in your project?
26. Where do you log functional bugs?
27. What kind of bugs have been raised for your module and why?
28. Do you follow RCA (Root Cause analysis) and Preventive Action?
29. What is your quality goals when you write code?
30. What kind of measure you follow to ensure good code quality?

If you answer is “No” or “we have not followed”, then you might be asked “why not” and what is your awareness about that practice. Being a junior or entry level developer, you would not even know if such thing exist, but if you handle these questions appropriately, your chances increases to crack the interview. Soon or later you must know the answer and applicability of all such question.