Arrays Algorithm Puzzle | Dataford Interview Questions

Teamware Solutions' QA analytics pipeline records signed event-impact scores from a test execution stream. Given the scores and a required threshold, find the length of the shortest contiguous segment whose sum is at least the threshold.

Scores may be negative, so a sliding-window approach that assumes expanding the window always increases its sum is not valid. Return -1 if no qualifying segment exists.

Formal Specification

Implement shortest_subarray(nums, k), where nums is a list of integers and k is an integer threshold. Return an integer representing the minimum length of a non-empty contiguous subarray with sum greater than or equal to k.

Constraints

1 <= len(nums) <= 100,000
-1,000,000,000 <= nums[i] <= 1,000,000,000
1 <= k <= 1,000,000,000,000
The answer must be computed in O(n) time

Function Signature

def shortest_subarray(nums, k):

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