SAP Associate Software Engineer Interview Questions and Answers

Round duration - 50 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This was a Data Structural round.

Q1. 
Distinct Islands Problem Statement
Given a two-dimensional array/list consisting of integers 0s and 1s, where 1 represents land and 0 represents water, determine the number of distinct islands. A group of...read more
Ans. 
Count the number of distinct islands in a 2D array of 0s and 1s.
• Identify islands by performing depth-first search (DFS) on the grid

• Use a set to store the shape of each island and check for duplicates

• Consider translations to determine distinct islands
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Round duration - 50 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This was a Data Structural round.

Q1. 
Word Wrap Problem Statement
You are tasked with arranging 'N' words of varying lengths such that each line contains at most 'M' characters, with each word separated by a space. The challenge is to minimiz...read more
Ans. 
The goal is to minimize the total cost of arranging 'N' words on each line with a maximum character limit 'M'.
• Calculate the cost of each line as the cube of extra space characters needed to reach 'M'.

• Minimize the total cost by arranging words to fit within the character limit on each line.

• Ensure each word appears fully on one line without breaking across lines.
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This was a System Design round.

Q1. Can you design a system similar to Red Bus that can handle bookings and onboard both vendors and customers to the platform?
Ans. 
Design a system similar to Red Bus for handling bookings and onboarding vendors and customers.
• Implement a user-friendly interface for customers to search and book tickets

• Create a vendor portal for vendors to manage their offerings and availability

• Include payment gateway integration for secure transactions

• Develop a robust backend system for managing bookings, cancellations, and refunds

• Utilize a database to store user in...read more
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Round duration - 50 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This was a System Design round

Round duration - 50 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This was an HR round.

Round duration - 1 hour
Round difficulty - Medium

Q1. 
First Missing Positive Problem Statement
You are provided with an integer array ARR of length 'N'. Your objective is to determine the first missing positive integer using linear time and constant space. T...read more
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Round duration - 90 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This round was the online coding test conducted on the platform Mettl. The languages allowed were C, C++, Java and Python. There were three questions. One was of graphs (Depth-first search), other was a big integer problem and the third was a string problem.

Q1. 
Graph Coloring Problem Statement
You are provided with a graph consisting of N vertices, numbered from 1 to N, and M edges. Your task is to color the graph using two colors, Blue and Red, such that no two...read more
Ans. 
Given a graph with vertices and edges, determine if it can be colored using two colors without adjacent vertices sharing the same color.
• Check if the graph is bipartite using graph coloring algorithm like BFS or DFS.

• If the graph is bipartite, return 'Possible' with a valid coloring assignment.

• If the graph is not bipartite, return 'Impossible'.
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Q2. 
String Compression Problem Statement
Write a program to perform basic string compression. For each character that repeats consecutively more than once, replace the consecutive duplicate occurrences with t...read more
Ans. 
Write a program to compress a string by replacing consecutive duplicate characters with the character followed by the number of repetitions.
• Iterate through the string and count consecutive occurrences of each character

• Append the character and its count to a new string

• Return the compressed string if it is shorter than the original, else return the original string

• Handle edge cases like single characters or when compresse...read more
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Round duration - 60 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

This was a pen and paper subjective interview round. You were expected to write full code on paper. Make sure you use proper names for the variables and write comments explaining very clearly what the code does. Also, try writing code in good handwriting which can be understood by the interviewer.

Q1. Find the total number of palindromic substrings in a given string.
Ans. 
Count total palindromic substrings in a given string.
• Iterate through each character in the string and consider it as the center of a palindrome. Expand outwards to find all palindromic substrings.

• Use dynamic programming to efficiently check if a substring is a palindrome.

• Consider both odd-length and even-length palindromes.

• Example: Input 'ababa', output 7 (a, b, a, b, a, aba, aba)
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Round duration - 45 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

The interview took place in the morning and the interviewer was very friendly.

Q1. 
Count Inversions Problem Statement
Let A[0 ... n-1] be an array of n distinct positive integers. An inversion of A is a pair of indices (i, j) such that i < j and A[i] > A[j]. Given an integer array...read more
Ans. 
Count the number of inversions in an array of distinct positive integers.
• Use merge sort algorithm to count inversions efficiently.

• Divide the array into two halves and recursively count inversions in each half.

• Merge the two sorted halves while counting split inversions.

• Time complexity can be optimized to O(n log n) using merge sort.

• Example: For input A = [2, 4, 1, 3, 5], the output should be 3.
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Q2. 
Sum Tree Conversion Problem Statement
Transform a given binary tree into a sum tree where each node is replaced by the sum of its immediate children's values. Leaf nodes should be replaced with 0. Then, p...read more
Ans. 
Convert a binary tree into a sum tree by replacing each node with the sum of its children's values, and return the preorder traversal.
• Traverse the tree recursively and replace each node with the sum of its children's values

• Leaf nodes should be replaced with 0

• Perform a preorder traversal on the transformed sum tree to get the final result
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Round duration - 30 minutes
Round difficulty - Easy

The HR Interview round was held in the morning and it was right after my technical interview.