Design a Movie Ticket Seat Booking System Object-Oriented Design Interview
Design a multi-theater ticket booking system where users search movies/showtimes, pick specific seats from a shared seat map, and complete a reservation with correctness under concurrent booking attempts.
1. Problem Statement
Design a movie ticket booking system: users search movies and browse theaters/showtimes, pick specific seats from a shared seat map for a showtime, and book one or more seats in a single reservation. If two users attempt to book the same seat at the same time, exactly one must succeed. Users can also cancel a reservation.
2. Live Coding Format
Work in the provided coding workspace while explaining your decisions to the live interviewer. Validation may use inline tests, examples, comments, or a verbal walkthrough.
3. Key Focus Areas
- 1Theater/Screen/Showtime/Seat/Reservation entity modeling
- 2Concurrency-safe seat booking (exactly one winner)
- 3Seat-hold vs. confirmed-booking state
- 4Cancellation and seat release
4. What Strong Candidates Should Demonstrate
- ✓Model theaters/screens/showtimes/seats/reservations with clear ownership boundaries.
- ✓Guarantee exactly-one-winner semantics for contested seat bookings.
- ✓Separate the read-heavy search path from the write-heavy, correctness-critical booking path.
- ✓Handle cancellation cleanly by releasing held/booked seats back to availability.
Want interactive feedback?
Practice this problem in the live coding workspace while the interviewer probes your clarification, implementation, trade-offs, and validation.
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