Debug a Project Assignment Codebase
Company: Scale AI
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
You are given a multi-file codebase and several CSV fixtures that implement a project assignment workflow. The system assigns people to projects based on course eligibility, project priority, and remaining capacity. Several automated tests are failing.
Your task is to inspect the existing implementation, reproduce the failures, and fix the bugs without changing the public API.
The expected behavior is:
1. A project can accept a new assignment only when its available headcount is strictly greater than 0.
2. Projects must be processed in descending order of priority.
3. Eligibility filtering must use `course_id`, not a generic row `id` field.
4. Any temporary state used inside a loop must be reset before the next iteration.
Describe how you would debug this codebase, identify the root causes, implement the fixes, and verify that the behavior is now correct.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates debugging, state management, test-driven troubleshooting, data filtering correctness, and the ability to maintain a public API within a multi-file codebase, under the software engineering fundamentals category.
