Interviewing For Big Project Experience

In Interviewing For Artifacts :

I introduced the idea of assessing for candidates by looking like an archaeologist for the artifacts of experience. Skill in a language will tend to create a familiarity with all the keywords of the language for example.

When assessing candidates for big project experience a similar approach can be used with a slight adjustment. You need to define what is motivating the desire for big project experience. No doubt the current project or the project you are about to start will be a big project. What are the difficulties you have experienced or expect to experience?

Process is a typical candidate. Usually with large projects you need heavier processes to both keep the project on track to the intended goal and to assure the project is making progress.

Sometimes the complexity of the code is the issue. You know the project will be compose of multiple assemblies, libraries or components.

Another common source is the need to leverage a large preexisting code base.

There are others, for them follow the pattern I will describe for the previous three.

Start off by asking the interview to describe the biggest project they have done. You are hoping for a brief synopsis or overview so that you can ask followup questions.

If the candidate responds with a project that is small then you are done. He has no big project experience.

On the other hand if the candidate describes a big project, you will then need to followup to see if they gained the experience you are looking to find. The first followup question is also simple; What challenges did you encounter?

If you are lucky they will describe the problems you encountered. If not you will then need to ask a leading followup question. One of :

What sort of processes were used, how did they affect the way you worked?
How many assemblies were there, what were their purposes, how did they interact?
Did you have to use a preexisting code base or framework?

What you are looking for is that the candidate encountered the problems you expect them to handle and that they learned from the experience. Now as a friend of mine pointed out, usually what he learned is he never wanted to do that again. I have had candidate express this feeling during interviews.

It is a mixed bag. On the one hand it is clear evidence of experience on the other hand, especially in the case of process, it may indicate they will not be happy in your environment. You should recap at the end of the interview that the job involves this particular challenge.