IT service desk analyst at Pellworth Housing
About 50 minutes. Included in Plus.
Seven requests are waiting on a Monday morning. Score and order the queue, report a possible account takeover with the facts security needs, and handle a new starter's access request without copying another person's access.
Skills: Score and order a service desk queue by impact and urgency; Refuse an account change that fails the identity check; Report a suspected account compromise with the facts security needs; Request access by least privilege through the data owner
Release captain (senior software engineer) at Orla Books
About 80 minutes. Included in Plus.
Release 5.4 must get a new bank feed connector live before an aggregator switches off its old interface on 31 October, but Android crashes, a slow migration and a quarantined test stand in the way. Judge readiness, recommend a plan and roll it out without over-promising.
Skills: Judge release readiness against written criteria and evidence; Separate what a dashboard shows from what the policy counts; Recommend a release plan that protects a hard external deadline; Ask for only the exceptions the policy allows, with reasons; Plan a staged rollout and the communications that depend on it
Software engineer at Gatehouse Tickets
About 60 minutes. Included in Plus.
A colleague's change will issue partial refunds to thousands of festival customers, and all its tests pass because they check the code against itself. Work out the right refunds from the finance policy, review the change, and hold the line on a money bug when the release date is used as pressure.
Skills: Check code against the rule it implements, not its own tests; Work out expected money values exactly from a policy; Write review comments an author can act on; Hold a safety decision under release pressure
Site reliability engineer at Pantry Lane
About 75 minutes. Included in Plus.
Customers could not pay for about an hour and a half on a busy Saturday. Rebuild the timeline and impact from the logs, write a blameless review that fixes conditions rather than people, book the review and brief customer care without promising what you cannot keep.
Skills: Reconstruct an incident timeline from logs and records; Measure customer impact and error budget use; Write a blameless review that names conditions, not people; Turn contributing factors into owned actions; Brief non-engineers honestly about an incident