The most important interview questions to ask when interviewing a Flutter developer.
Flutter has emerged as the most popular cross-platform development framework, leaving React Native the competition behind. Naturally, Flutter developers are sought after more than ever before.
But to Hire Flutter Developer for your app project, you also need to consider quality concerns. Hence according to Imperoit, a rigorous technical evaluation followed by a soft skill assessment is a must for the hiring process. Let’s assume you already have a fair idea about the hiring process. But do you know the key questions to ask while interviewing a Flutter developer?
Let’s explain all the key questions you need to ask Flutter developers to hire in an app project.
Questions You Need to Ask in Soft Skill Interview
If you think you only need to evaluate the developers’ programming skills and technical expertise in an interview, you still lack an understanding of the evaluation process. Apart from asking technical questions, you must also evaluate their personality attributes since they need to work alongside your in-house team. You also need to judge their communication and collaborative skills, long-term career goals, and attitude to app development as a career path. Let’s now figure out what are particular questions to ask in the soft skill interview.
How do you deal with unique and never-before scenarios?
Every app project should be a new and innovative one for the developers. Only a mindset like that can incorporate out-of-the-box approaches to a software project easily. The candidates’ answer to this question is how they can feel comfortable dealing with the development challenges.
How they can work when the working atmosphere is difficult?
In-app projects, developers often find themselves in difficult relationships. But in the midway, they cannot leave the project or underperform. It is important to know how they handle such situations and continue to deliver their best. Ask about their past experience handling such situations to have a comprehensive understanding of their personality.
Just give them hints of situations when the project manager is not available, or a crucial piece task from the other end is pending. How the developer handles the situation can greatly impact their output.
How do they ensure adhering to the project deadline?
Another crucial question that you need to ask is how they ensure adhering to the project deadline and milestones. Instead of just hollow assurance, ensure they can provide you with some time-tested methods to achieve this.
What motivates them as developers to excel as Flutter app developers?
Understanding the career mindset of the developers is also important. Most successful developers instead of telling you common motivational jargon will speak of specific career goals and objectives to advance their developer career in the short and long run.
Basic Technical interview questions to ask Flutter app developers?
Now, it is time to carry out a rigorous technical interview. This process should begin with a basic set of questions to know about their understanding of the basic value propositions of Flutter and how the framework works. Start your technical interview with the following questions.
Why should you choose Flutter instead of other cross-platform frameworks?
This question is somewhat like asking them why they choose to become a Flutter developer instead of being a React Native or Xamarin developer. With this question, you can easily understand how they figured out the key advantages of Flutter for the app projects they built.
While reusability of code, hot reloading, and widget-based development are common answers, do they also refer to the advantages of Dart programming language? In that case, you should press further to make them explain the Dart advantages. Another crucial question is how do the Flutter widgets help a project instead of the JavaScript bridge used by React Native?
How do the Flutter widgets work?
Now, since any Flutter developers know that widgets are key to app projects built with Flutter, it is important to ask how the widgets in Flutter app projects work. How do the Flutter widgets for iOS and Android work, and what are the benefits and limitations of this widget-based development approach?
Ask developers how they are versed with different IDEs used in Flutter projects?
As we all know Flutter supports an array of Integrated Development Environments (IDE) for cross-platform app projects, it is important to evaluate how the candidates are versed in working with these IDEs. Ask them the key value propositions of IDEs such as Xcode, Android Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, Visual Studio, Emacs, Codemagic, and other leading ones.
Ask about the key shortcomings of Flutter and Dart
Now, the developer has already expressed the key advantages of using Flutter. You now have to ask him about the key shortcomings of the Flutter framework and the Dart programming language. For example, compared to React Native, Flutter allows reusing less code across platforms. Similarly, the .Net language used by Xamarin offers some distinct advantages. You need to make them compare these technologies in depth.
How can they build an interactive app feature with Flutter?
This is a question to evaluate the technical understanding of Flutter’s stateful and stateless widgets. Since with Flutter you need to use stateful parent widgets to wrap the stateless widgets for developing interactive features, this question will reveal the development knowledge and abilities of the candidate.
In what ways do you make use of the keys?
In Flutter development, a separate key class works like identifiers for using the Widgets, UI Elements, and SemanticsNodes contextually in the app project. Now when under the parent widget any UI widget is modified, these keys help in preserving the state of the widgets and delivering a stable UI. You need t: Debugo evaluates how the Flutter developers understand using the keys.
What are the principal build modes in Flutter?
In Flutter, we have three distinct build modes such as Debug, Release, and Profile. Every build mode denotes a particular stage of development and understanding all of them is important. Tell them to explain each of these modes and what purpose they serve.
What is BuildContext in Flutter development?
The BuildContext in Flutter defines the functionality represented by the particular widget as per the built method. This is a separate class which is important to define the use case of a widget in a particular context. Ask the candidate to explain this class regarding custom widget development.
How is Widget Testing done?
Though in every app project the basic testing methods such as user testing, functional testing, and integration testing remain the same, in Flutter there is another testing method called widget testing. Widget tests are done for each UI widget separately. Ask the developer candidate why widget testing is important and how it is done. You also need to ask them about some credible widget testing tools that are used across Flutter projects.
How is state management done, and what are the key state management approaches?
For Flutter developers, this is usually considered to be the most tricky question to reveal their technical command on Flutter development. You have already asked them elementary questions about the widget state based upon which the widget tree is created. Now, it is time to go deeper and ask them about various state management approaches.
Ask them about using state management tools such as Redux, setState, MobX, BLoc, inheritedWidget, etc. How they explain using these approaches for widget state management will reveal their command and expertise in Flutter app development.
Wrapping Up
We have almost covered all the soft skills and technical questions you need to ask when interviewing Flutter developers for your app project. It is true that even after asking all these questions and getting satisfactory answers, you cannot be cent percent sure about their abilities and expertise. But at least an interview and evaluation process with these rigorous questions will lay bare their theoretical knowledge and, to some extent, practical development exposure.
The future of Flutter app development seems to be bright as it stands as one of the most sought-after frameworks for challenging app projects across the niches. Naturally, to stay ahead of the competition you need to hire developers with an exceptional command of the technical aspects of the framework. This is why considering these interview questions for evaluating basic to advanced Flutter skills is important.
