questions to ask the interviewer!

WORK METHODOLOGY AND WORK STYLE

• What kind of software engineering methodology is
  practised here?
  Agile, Iterative, Waterfall?
  
  
• Do you
  have something like a "Quick Response Team" that monitors and handles
  critical/production issues?
  
  
• Is quality control here more
  proactive or reactive? Do you have PCVs? PreCheckinVerifications?
  Do
  testers have test cases ready before the dev drop? Do testers
  automate some of these major test cases prior to dev drop? Do
  testers automate at all?
  
  
• What is the timeframe for a
  typical major release/milestone? (We used to have a significant
  milestone in 6-8 weeks in Pi - minor milestones would be done in 1-2
  weeks, depending on urgency of the bugfix/release).
  
  
• Level
  of whitebox testing: Do testers here look at code? Do you
  encourage them to?
  
  
• Can QAs attend dev design
  discussions? If not, then can the QA get a design dump as soon as
  design is finalized?
  
  
• Do Devs write their own unit
  tests for each feature that they develop? Does QA accept the dev
  drop only after all unit tests have passed?
  
  
• What kind of
  source control do you use? CVS, SVN, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar?
  
  
• How
  do you feel about documentation?
  What kind/level of
  documentation do you follow for:
  - business requirements
  - software requirements specifications (SRS)
  - software design spec
  - coding (code commenting standards, wiki pages, etc)
  - testing
  (overall test plan for a given team+milestone, feature test spec, test
  suites, test cases)
  - defects (defects db,

CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENT

• TRICKY, HARD-HITTING QUESTION: Do you encourage
  employees to work on technical projects of their own? Do you support
  them by giving them, say, half a day per week to pursue their personal
  projects? Otherwise how do you expect employees to be innovative and
  passionate about technology? (i.e. citing examples of projects on
  DechoLabs - the URL Security Tester that would pass null and bogus
  parameters to the URLs in the hope of causing a crash e.g.)
  
  Another example is the TestLabAutomation initiative (Django project) that Biju and I had started.
  
  
• How seriously does your company take CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility)? What initiatives and programs does your company currently have for this?



• Do programmers have a quiet work environment? If I want to have a discussion with my cube-mate, do I have to schedule a meeting in a meeting room?
  
  
• How is the work environment here? Rigid/formal or open/relaxed/casual?
  
  
• What are the working hours like? How strictly are work hours enforced?
  
  
• What are the recreational facilities? What do employees do here when they're not working? Is there a TT table? Is there a gym?

references:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/329289/really-wow-them-in-the-interview