Topic: Latest Honeywell placement papers (2007/08)

Paper 1

Here is the Honeywell question paper that was asked to one of my MS friends in last year’s campus interview (Honeywell).

Honeywell conducted a test in IIT and Interview was in their office at Bangalore.

Test contained 100 multiple choice questions divided into

a) Verbal ability (15 questions)
b) Numerical aptitude (15 )
c) Logical and analytical ability (15)
d) Elementary computer science (10)
d) Programming languages (20)
e) Operating systems and Data structures (25)

Not sure about the number of questions.

Verbal ability questions contained 3 parts.
a) One passage is given and U have to answer 5 questions
b) Some words are given and their synonyms have to be written
c) Numerical aptitude and Logical questions were the usual stuff.

First round (around 45 minutes) contained, questions from Real-time
———–
Systems (my research area), operating systems and Software Engineering

Explain your research work.

1. What is a Real-Time System ?
2. What is the difference between Hard and Soft real-time systems ?
3. What is a mission critical system ?
4. What is the important aspect of a real-time system ?
5. Explain the difference between micro kernel and macro kernel.
6. Give an example of micro kernel.
7. Why paging is used ?
8. Which is the best page replacement algorithm and Why ?
9. What is software life cycle ?
10. How much time is spent usually in each phases and why ?
11. Which one do you want to work if selected in Honeywell ? ( I said I don’t like testing )
12. They asked why ? I said it is a boring job. Then they tried to analyze the knowledge in testing.
13. What is testing ?
14. Which are the different types of testing ?
15. Then they explained the way they do testing. They said that they are doing testing in requirement phase and design phase so that if any
16. problem comes in those phases it is not necessary to go back and change the requirement or design. All the test processing is automated.
17. Why do you want to join Honeywell ? Ans : To get a practical feeling of Real-time systems.
18. Do U know C++ ?
19. How good are U in C and C++ ?
20. Rate yourself in both C and C++. ( 1 - 10 marks)

Second round (around 45 minutes )
————
They wanted a bio-data at the time of interview. I gave the placement
office bio-data and in that one there was column ‘Major subjects
studied’. Many of the questions came from those.

1. Explain your research work. Lot of questions from it.
2. What is a distributed system ?
3. Some questions about CSP. ( I kept quiet)
4. Which languages do U know ?
5. What are the differences between Pascal and C.I said Pascal is a strongly typed language.
6. Then what is typing and its advantages ?
7. Then he asked some questions from Compiler construction and Lisp.
8. Which are the different computer architectures ?
9. What is the requirement in MIMD ?
10. What is the difference between RISC and CISC processors ?
11. Difference between loosely coupled and tightly coupled systems ?
12. What is an open system ?Still a lot of questions from software engineering .
13. Which are the different phases in Software life cycle (asked again)
14. Why is analysis and testing phases very important ?
15. Which methodologies are you familiar with ?
16. Have you worked in windows ? (Yes)
17. What is the difference you have seen from a Dos environment ?I said it event driven .
18. So what do you mean by event driven ?
19. How do WinMain look like ?
20. How the messages are processed in Windows ?(Queue of events)
21. What are parameters needed to distinguish an event ?
22. Have you done any network programming ?
23. Why networks are layered ?
24. What is the advantage of that ?
25. How many layers are there in OSI ?
26. Why is it called OSI model ?
27. Are U familiar with network topologies ?
28. Which are the different network topologies ?
29. Tell an example of bus type network. I said Ethernet.
30. What is the Bandwidth of Ethernet ?
31. Explain the advantage and disadvantage of Ethernet ?
32. Which is the protocol used in Ethernet. (CSMA/CD)
33. Why is it called so ?
34. If all stations tries to communicate at same time, what will happen.
35. What is binary exponential backoff algorithm ?
36. What is the advantage of Ring network ?
37. Compare it with Ethernet.
38. In a real-time system which one do U prefer and why ?
39. What is the basic requirement of a real-time network ?
40. Which one is costly - Ethernet of ring networks ?
41. Some questions form OOSD and Digital signal processing.
42. What is inheritance, encapsulation etc.

Third Round (15 minutes)
———–

1. Asked about the percentages and marks during SSC, PDC, B.Tech and MS.
2. When can you join ?
3. Who is you’r guide ?
4. You are from which place ?
5. Where is it in Kerala ?
6. How do you perform in the first two interviews ?
7. Why have you given Honeywell as dream job ?

Some more personal questions

Fourth Round (45 minutes)
————

1. What do U like in Bangalore ? I said the weather and all my friends are here.
2. Asked about my family members.
3. How do You interact with friends ?
4. How do adjust to a new environment ?
5. Suppose U solve a problem and after that U are getting an almost same
6. problem with high complexity ( and lower complexity). How will U
7. approach to the next problem.
8. What is your approach towards a new subject ?
9. How do U prepare for exams ?
10. Suppose in a project meeting, somebody fires U, how will U react ?
11. Are U patient enough to wait in long queues ?
12. Still some more which I don’t remember.
    
    
    Paper 2
    
    
    The questions are from

    SOFTWARE ENGINEERING,

13. C programming,
14. Data structures,
15. Operating systems.

Some of The Questions :

• SDLC (software development life cycle)-what r various models [waterfall, prototype, iterative enhancement, spiral], wht r the steps under these models.
• Some question about Testing, unit testing, integration testing, alpha, beta testing, system testing.
• What is CMM levels, Six sigma, ISO standards.
• What r various steps under which a C program is converted into .exe file (preprocessing, compilation, linking)
• Program for any sorting method (I made bubble sort, he discussed complexity issues of various sorting algorithms)
• Program for matrix multiplication.
• What are the different kinds of tree (questions about Binary tree, Binary search tree, AVL tree)
• Difference between arrays and linked list, which one is better (I said it depends upon application, if we want to store some name ie character string of predefined length array will be better option b’coz more memory is required to store pointers etc)
• Some question about Aerospace, aviation etc(I said these thing were not part of my syllabus at all, but I if I get a chance to learn the these I can quickly learn them)
• Which data structure is used in expression evaluation, how a infix expression is evaluated (first converted into postfix, then evaluate using stack)
• Some operating system questions (about scheduling, semaphore, mutexes)
• What is Real time system, difference between hard and soft real time systems with examples(hint: in hard real time systems strict dead lines r imposed, THE SYSTEM WILL FAIL if the processing is not done within defined time constrains ex. Firing a missile on a aircraft, whereas in soft real time system deadlines are important but missing the deadline will not lead to system failure, for ex. DVD player when a command is given through remote, the delay of few millisecond will not lead to serious implications)

There are Two Technical Round procedure:

1: Direct, face-to-face technical round

2: Telephonic Technical round

Some Candidates had direct and some had Telephonic Round. Be through with your project, they will ask you questions related to your project and skills that you have. So you better be careful about what you write in your resume.

For written test:

Two set of papers were there, 1 for EC & 1 for CS. [ If you want a easy paper go for CS ]

50 Technical: most of the weightage was given to DBMS, data structures etc.

30 C programming: Read exploring C completely, in my suggestion that is vry good & sufficient book for C questions.

20 Aptitude question:

Some Questions were like:

1> Arrange Them in the order of space complexity Merge sort, quick sort, heap sort

2> Void main()
{
complete=10;
complete1=11;
if(complete=12)
{
printf (”hi”);
}
else
{
printf(”hello”);
}
printf(”%d %d “,complete,complete1);
}
Output: hi 12 11

3> How many times in a day the hr. & min. hands of a clock are in straight line.

4> How many times in a day the hr. & min. hands of a clock meet each other.

5> Structure A
{
int x;
float y;
}a;
union B
{

int p;
float ;
}b;
choices: 1.all the times a & b have same size, 2. such declaration r not possible
3. a & b have same size. 4 ……

6>Program to illustrate Flow in Switch case block.