Novartis Placement Paper

About Company: NOVARTIS is a Swiss based MNC and world number one in Pharmaceutical. It has a very good brand name. It's having around 80,000 employees. It's entering IT insustry now to handle the large number of their in-house projects. As of now, the only development center in India is in Mumbai.
The interviews are held for more than 3 years experience in JAVA, J2EE.

There are 3 rounds :

1. Technical Test (25 questions in 45 minutes time)
2. Group Discussion (30 minutes)
3. Technical & HR interview (30 minutes to 90 minutes)
I wrote here all the questions I remember. I think I almost covered most of them.
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Technical Test
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All are multiple choice questions.
1) Question on Static Methods, whether they can be overloaded or not
2) A java program on nested (inner) loops and it is asked what is the output of the program.
3) Once a Servlet is initialized, how do you get the initialization parameters ?
(a) Initialization parameters will not be stored
(b) They will be stored in instance variables
(c) using config.getInitParameters()
ANS: I think answer is (c)

4) A question on functionality of <forward> tag in JSP
5) If the cookies are disabled, how can you maintain the Session.
ANS: URL rewriting
6) If there are strict timelines and if you want to get high performance for JSP to DB access, what method you suggest ?
(a) Moving application server in to same manchine as Database
(b) By storing results in Cache
(c) By implementing Connection Pooling
ANS: I think answer is (c)

7) A question on MVC architecture and the functionality of Controller and View.
8) Question on Design Pattern. (I don't remember it)
9) Which Design Pattern hides the complexities of all sub-systems ?
(I don't remember the options and also don't know answer.)
10) In CMP bean, which method executes only once in life time
(a) setEntityContext()
(b) create()
(c) remove()
(d) find()
ANS: I think answer is (b)
11) Which bean can be called as Multi-Threaded bean ?
(a) Entity beans
(b) Stateless Session beans
(c) Stateful Session beans
(d) Pooled Stateless Session beans
ANS: I think answer is (d)

12) A question on Threads in Java, whether we need to mention the word "Daemon" explicitly to make a thread as Daemon.
13) A question on Transactions of EJB. I think the question is something similar to - "Which is faster ?"
(a) TRANSACTION_UNREPEATABLE_READ
(b) TRANSACTION_REPEATABLE_READ
(c) TRANSACTION_COMMIT_READ
(d) TRANSACTION_UNCOMMIT_READ
(I don't know answer and also I am not sure of options. but the options are something similar to this.)
14) Question on EJB Home Object, Remote Object and what functionalities will be performed by each.
15) What is the difference between Server and Container
(a) A Container can have multiple Servers
(b) A Server can have multiple Containers
(c) A Server can have only one Container
ANS: I think answer is (b)
16) ejbStore() method is equivalent to
(a) SELECT
(b) INSERT
(c) UPDATE
(d) DELETE
ANS: I think answer is (c)
17) A question on where the garbage collection is done. I think the answer is : "finalize()" method
18) A question properties of Primary key in Entity Beans (I don't remember the options exactly.)
(a) Primary key consists of only basic data types in java
(b) Primary key can contain composite data types
Remarks on Technical Test : It's a bit difficult and lot of questions are on EJBs, JSPs and Design Patterns.
Group Discussion
Topics:
1. Development of India
2. Qualities to become a successful manager

Technical & HR Interview

1) Tell about yourself ?

2) Explain your projects and what design patterns they follow !

3) Questions on Project management, Team management, Defect prevention, Quality procedures (These, questions are in detail and on each aspect. This went on for around 1 hour.)

4) Tell something about your current company

5) Reasons for leaving current company.

6) Current salary & Expected salary !

6) Any Questions ?