Research & Evidence-Based Practice Flashcards

Which Spring Boot Actuator endpoint exposes a structured health check that can be used as evidence of application readiness in CI/CD pipelines?

Answer: /actuator/health

The /actuator/health endpoint returns a structured JSON report of application health indicators, commonly used as readiness/liveness probes in CI/CD and Kubernetes.

A team wants to validate Spring Security configuration changes don't break existing access rules. What is the recommended evidence-based testing strategy?

Answer: Use @WithMockUser and MockMvc security tests

@WithMockUser combined with MockMvc allows automated, repeatable security integration tests that verify access rules without requiring a running server.

What Spring framework feature enables reproducible, data-driven tests by pre-populating the database with known state before each test?

Answer: @Sql annotation

@Sql allows specifying SQL scripts to execute before or after a test method, ensuring a known and reproducible database state for evidence-based testing.

When researching Spring bean initialization order issues, which tool provided by Spring Framework helps visualize the dependency graph?

Answer: ApplicationContext.getBeanDefinitionNames() combined with dependency introspection

Programmatic inspection via getBeanDefinitionNames() and BeanFactory dependency APIs, or IDE plugins, are the evidence-based approaches for diagnosing Spring bean dependency ordering issues.

Which JMH (Java Microbenchmark Harness) integration practice is recommended when benchmarking Spring-managed beans to get accurate results?

Answer: Initialize the Spring context in @Setup and inject beans before timing

The recommended practice is to initialize the Spring context once in a @Setup method and inject beans before the timed benchmark loop, isolating context startup from the measured operation.

A researcher comparing Spring MVC vs Spring WebFlux throughput should primarily measure which metric under high concurrency?

Answer: Requests per second at a defined latency percentile (e.g., p99)

Requests-per-second at a defined latency percentile (p99) is the evidence-based metric for comparing throughput and tail latency between Spring MVC and WebFlux under concurrency.

Spring's @ConditionalOnProperty annotation is frequently used in evidence-based configuration. What happens if the specified property is absent and matchIfMissing is not set?

Answer: The condition evaluates to false and the bean is not registered

By default, if the property is absent and matchIfMissing is not specified (defaults to false), @ConditionalOnProperty evaluates to false and the bean is skipped.