Starting a Magento Commerce Project? You would want a smart, experienced, and someone highly professional whom you can rely upon. How would you ensure reliability?
The answer is – by screening the developer’s competencies when hiring them. Recruiting skilled & innovative candidates can help you deliver quality outcomes and always have a solution when the project gets stuck.
In this article, we will share a few questions that can help you hire Magento developer that is right fit for the technical position you have opened. The interview starts with general questions like “tell us about yourself” and some “Magento Basics” to loosen up the candidate.
In order to screen the candidate deeply, here is the list of questions that will show technical expertise & knowledge of real-world web development solutions. The questions listed below are composed of both back-end and front-end. You can either segregate them for hiring individual candidates for back and front-end or ask all for a Magento developer with knowledge of both.
Magneto 2 Interview Question That You Should Ask
An experienced Magento Back-end developer is supposed to have an in-depth knowledge of the languages, such as PHP, and MySQL, proven working experience of OOP & design patterns, and expertise in Git & Composer. Hence, you can interview them regarding the same.
1. What is Magento 2 File Structure?
Magento 2 file structure contains directories, blocks, controllers, models, etc that relate to features, such as admin panel or user login. If the candidate is well-versed with the Magento 2 file structure’s implementation, type of file content, and ways to customize the structure.
2. Understanding the Magento Database.
The developer must be well versed with the EAV database model used in Magento. The database supports tables with metadata that can be used differently wherever the product attributes seem sparse. EAV is meant to keep the architecture clear & organized and back-end optimized. For instance, an online store like Amazon may have multiple products, each with different attributes, such as TV has screen resolution & size as attributes while a Men’s clothes may have attributes, such as colors and size. EAV can manage it all without hassle.
A knowledgeable developer might also mention the types of Magento databases and indexes.
3. How to Implement EAV in Magento?
When you see that the developer is explaining the above answer seamlessly, you can further ask this question to dig more into its knowledge.
EAV is a model in Magento and can be divided into three parts – Entity, Attribute, & Value.
- Entities – Product, categories, customers.
- Attributes – Name, price, status & more related to the entity.
- Values – Specifications of attributes, such as Mid-rise jeans or Knee Length skirts.
A new EAV model is created with six tables within and the attribute that stays in the entity table is a static attribute.
These answers will help you understand the knowledge of the developer on the project architect of the EAV model.
4. What is Dependency Injection
The candidate must be able to explain the dependency injection & inversion principle in detail, including injection types used in Magento and their configuration.
However, to shorten up, dependency injection is a design pattern in Magento where object B performs an action after receiving methods/information from Object A, which means Object B is completely dependent on Object A for further actions.
ObjectManager is used to create objects in specific classes and to retrieve information about all class dependencies, Magento uses a constructor for it.
5. What are Service Contracts?
A quality code is possible with the help of service contractors. That helps merchants to integrate third-party systems, configure services as web APIs, and seamlessly help them with Magento 2 Upgrade. Hence, the candidate you are interviewing must emphasize using service contractors.
To explain, service contractors are basically a set of PHP interfaces defined for modules. A well-versed developer would know the purpose and use of the service contractors as they enhance the modularity of Magento and guarantee compatibility with other Magento versions.
6. How should you use an ObjectManager?
Yes, this term was used in creating objects in specific classes. But, we want to understand the ways or methods to use it.
Magento delivers exceptional results when developing large applications. Here is where ObjectManager is greatly used. ObjectManager is never directly used in classes/templates as it can break the dependency injection principles, making code testing difficult.
ObjectManager can aid in the configuration & instantiation of an object, manage dependency injection, allow singleton pattern implementation, and automate the initialization of parameters.
7. What do you know about Virtual Type?
You can also ask the developer about the possible use cases of the Virtual Type to judge their knowledge.
However, virtual type is a method to configure dependency injection. Virtual types can never be directly referenced into the source code, they are injected via a di.xml file. A virtual type lets you change or configure specific classes seamlessly. The developer must know exceptions well to use virtual type in the source code to configure classes.
8. What are the peculiarities of working with Magento 2.3 and 2.4?
Regardless of the latest version, many merchants are still continuing to use Magento 2.3 due to a lack of knowledge. Here an expert and knowledgeable developer can help brands impart benefits of migration from 2.3 to 2.4 to accelerate scalability.
Coming to the answer, you might hear, is the new approach of a declarative database schema in Magento 2.3 that allows table description via .xml files. In Magento 2.3, patches are coded as a separate PHP class.
Whereas Magento 2.4 supports ElasticSearch as a catalog search solution. Declarative schemes still remain in trend in Magento 2.4 programming. Magento 2.4 saves time in developing creative workflow with the new Media Gallery and builds headless store fronts faster.
9. How to deploy Magento in the Cloud?
You must not analyze just the technical part, but also the knowledge of tools used for secure & flexible Magento web design & development.
Adobe already offers a ready-to-use system code and hosting infrastructure to invest less time in hosting. Yet the developer must know about the CLI tools to analyze the logs, understand a bit about DevOps, and ability to resolve deployment issues.
10. Differentiate between Foreign and Primary Keys
Not just defining the term, the developer must also know how to use these keys safely to bring benefit to the store architecture.
To define, a primary key is meant to produce unique values within a table. The primary key can be a static column or a set of columns, such as an order ID for the customer that can be tracked by the businesses.
Foreign Key, on the other hand, is a complete column within the primary key linked to it. The references between the tables help analysts look into the data and link them together for the customer.
11. What do you know about Composer.lock?
Composer.lock helps in managing Cloud for Adobe Commerce dependencies and upgrades hence every Magento back-end developer is well versed with the term. It also informs about the packages that are included, the work of the packages, and how well they fit together.
If you are hiring an experienced candidate, then they must know that composer.lock contains exact versions of Magento packages and dependencies information. It also ensures that even while making changes to the website, everything is well aligned to ensure that no merchants experience problems in their store.
12. How do you create a New Theme in Magento?
A Magento developer knows about the file structure of the Magento theme. The candidate must be able to easily reveal the common Magento directories, such as web, 1i8n, media, etc, static and dynamic files, and theme.xml file configuration for quickly customizing a theme.
13. Name some of the best practices used in Magento programming.
The complexity is high when it comes to the development of a powerful and intuitive website, unlike other platforms, which makes it even more important for a developer to follow some practices. A few that a developer must mention are –
- Writing a code that is reusable to avoid code redundancy.
- Easily replaceable code designing for quick upgrades & improvements.
- Avoid building helper classes to not violate principles of object-oriented programming.
- Consistency with case and naming conventions.
- Taking composition over inheritance.
- Testing the code before releasing.
Another principle is the SOLID principle, which says the code must be always neat and bug-free.
14. What is the Declarative Schema?
This is the most recent update of Adobe Commerce to simplify Magento installation and
upgrades. If the developer does not use a declarative scheme, they will have to write PHP database scripts for every new version of Magento, which is a tedious task. Additionally, writing database scripts multiple times is a waste of time and full of clutter.
15. What is Magento API and How to Use it?
Magento API is a framework needed for sending requests and receiving responses between Magento core code and third-party systems. The candidate must be well aware of the authentications supported by Magento 2, such as OAuth, REST, and SOAP APIs. Mobile applications use tokens for authentication.
This way, you can really know whether the mentioned capabilities and knowledge are true or are bluffing about them.
To Conclude –
Asking questions never aims to grill the candidate, instead dig if they acquire real knowledge. Their answers ensure that they have the skills and expertise necessary to become a valuable asset to the company.
Other relevant questions that you can ask can be related to HTML & CSS basics, UI components, Magento themes, and many more. The list seems endless for judging the candidate. However, the aforementioned questions can help you judge a candidate without much effort. Author’s Bio: Scarlett works with the editorial team of A3logics, a leading company offering Magento development services. Exploring the latest technologies, reading about them, and writing her views have always been her passion. She seeks new opportunities to express her opinions, explore technological advancements, and document the details. You can always find her enjoying books or articles about varied topics or jotting down her ideas in a notebook.