📊 Assessment – Week 5: Spring Boot

This assessment evaluates your understanding of Spring Boot fundamentals, REST API development, and backend architecture.

It is designed to measure both:

• Conceptual clarity
• Practical implementation skills

---

🎯 Assessment Objectives

By completing this assessment, you should demonstrate:

• Understanding of IoC and Dependency Injection
• Ability to design REST APIs
• Knowledge of layered architecture
• Ability to write clean, maintainable backend code
• Basic API testing skills

---

🧠 Section 1: Conceptual Questions

Answer the following in your own words.

---

1. What is Inversion of Control (IoC)? Why is it important?

---

2. What is Dependency Injection? How does it improve code quality?

---

3. Difference between Spring Framework and Spring Boot?

---

4. What is a REST API?

---

5. Explain the role of:

• Controller
• Service
• Repository

---

6. What is @RestController?

---

7. Difference between:

• @GetMapping
• @PostMapping

---

8. Why should business logic not be written in the controller?

---

9. What is application.properties used for?

---

10. What HTTP status codes would you return for:

• Successful GET
• Resource created
• Resource not found
• Server error

---

💻 Section 2: Code Understanding

---

11. Identify the issue in the following code:

@RestController
public class ExpenseController {

    @GetMapping("/expenses")
    public List<String> getExpenses() {
        ExpenseService service = new ExpenseService();
        return service.getExpenses();
    }
}

👉 What is wrong? How would you fix it?

---

12. What will happen if @Service annotation is missing from a service class?

---

13. What is the output of this API?

@GetMapping("/hello")
public String sayHello() {
    return "Hello, World!";
}

👉 How would you test it?

---

🛠 Section 3: Practical Tasks

---

14. Create a simple REST API with:

• GET /items → returns list
• POST /items → adds item

---

15. Refactor the following into layered architecture:

@RestController
public class UserController {

    @GetMapping("/users")
    public List<String> getUsers() {
        List<String> users = new ArrayList<>();
        users.add("A");
        users.add("B");
        return users;
    }
}

---

16. Add a Service layer for the above example.

---

17. Add proper Dependency Injection.

---

🧪 Section 4: API Testing

---

18. Test your APIs using Postman or curl.

Provide:

• Request details
• Response
• Status code

---

19. What happens if:

• You send invalid data?
• You call a non-existing endpoint?

---

📈 Evaluation Criteria

Category	Marks
Conceptual Understanding	20
Code Quality	20
API Design	20
Architecture (Layering)	20
Testing & Validation	20
Total	100

---

🧠 Mentor Evaluation Notes

The mentor will evaluate based on:

• Clarity of explanation
• Clean code practices
• Proper use of annotations
• Separation of concerns
• Ability to debug and explain

---

⚠️ Common Mistakes to Watch

• Creating objects manually instead of using DI
• Writing logic inside controllers
• Not following naming conventions
• Not testing APIs
• Ignoring edge cases

---

🏁 Expected Outcome

By successfully completing this assessment, you should be able to:

• Build basic REST APIs using Spring Boot
• Structure backend code properly
• Understand how Spring manages dependencies
• Test and validate APIs

---