Assign tennis bookings to minimum courts
Company: Atlassian
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Coding & Algorithms
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
## Expanding Tennis Club (Interval Scheduling)
You run a tennis club with an unlimited number of courts. Each booking has a start and finish time.
```text
class BookingRecord {
int id;
int startTime;
int finishTime;
}
List<Assignment> assignCourts(List<BookingRecord> bookingRecords)
```
### Part (a)
Implement `assignCourts` to return a **plan that assigns each booking to a specific court** such that:
- No court has overlapping bookings.
- The total number of courts used is **minimized**.
Your output can be any structure that includes, for each booking, the assigned `courtId`.
### Part (b) – maintenance buffer after each booking
After each booking on a court, the court requires a fixed maintenance time `X` (e.g., cleaning) before it can be used again.
- If a booking ends at time `t`, the next booking on the same court cannot start before `t + X`.
Update the assignment logic accordingly.
### Part (c) – maintenance only after some usage
Follow-up variant: maintenance is not required after every booking, but only after a court has accumulated a certain amount of usage (clarify with the interviewer whether this threshold is in number of bookings or total time used). Update the assignment approach to support this rule.
### Notes
- Times are integers.
- You may assume `startTime < finishTime`.
- State any additional constraints you rely on (e.g., max N).
Quick Answer: This question evaluates understanding of interval scheduling and temporal resource allocation, testing algorithm design, complexity analysis, and appropriate data-structure use for assigning bookings to a minimal number of courts.