Do you have a suggestion for a software testing interview question that should be used more often?
AT*SQA asked test managers and experienced software testers / QA analysts if they had suggestions for questions that should be asked more often in software testing interviews and QA analyst interviews. Below are their responses.| What is your testing experience? |
| What is your future goal and your plans to achieve them? |
| What's your opinion about ratio between developers and testers on a project? |
| It's not really a question, but I believe that people should have a set of requirements, and an application that contains defects. The applicant should test the system and record any defects found. I feel that this could be more helpful than asking questions that people can train to answer correctly. |
| Show me how to test a specific application live. |
| What is the definition of done? |
| What is a specific experience that supports your creditability/capability to accomplish the given requirements of the position you are applying for? |
| Design a test plan for a spoon (or other everyday item). |
| What is the first thing you would do if you start working here? |
| What is regression testing? |
| Ways to discern analytical skills and not just hard technical skills. |
| What is the best attribute in an employee? |
| How do you feel about puzzles (i.e. crossword, jigsaw, sudoku, etc)? |
| Please explain your perspective on holistic testing. |
| What would make you leave your job after only a few months? This identifies deal-breakers. |
| Describe how you would participate in a Kanban team? |
| How do you handle conflict within a test team or with developers? In other words, how do you handle conflict at work? |
| What is included in a test plan, test case, bug report, and test report? It's amazing how many veteran testers can't answer this simple question. |
| What role in the design of the software should you as a tester play? |
| What should be the right process to test a software? |
| Ask about ANALYSIS SKILLS and stop asking about test tools! Unless complex projects can be properly analysed to determine suitable tests many tests will be missed and coverage poor. The importance of a particular test tool is given far too much emphasis ( I have 22+ years experience). |
| Tell me about your working & educational background. |
| What do you expect from this job? |
| As a director of both testing and dev organizations, I found that people who very much enjoy puzzles (crosswords, suduko, word games as well as actual puzzles) were more likely to do well in testing. |
| How would you handle the production issue/outage? |
| How much of your resume did you inflate or embelish? |
| When have you tested too much? |
| What is your opinion regarding recorded automated tests vs. coded automated tests? What are the pros and cons of each approach? What is the difference between a developer and a tester? |
| In your opinion, where do you think automation fits into the testing on a project? |
| Using a simple logic diagram, how many test paths are needed? |
| Work experience matches with current job |
| More example-driven questions; technical exercises are great as long as they're relevant to the role and not about some low-level functionality like string transposition, which a test automation engineer has probably never done. |
| Explain the differences of white/black/grey box testing. |
| What Automation tools have you used? |
| How do you translate requirements into testable test conditions or cases? |
| Describe the relationship of QA to devs? |
| How would you test Netflix? |
| What can we do to make working with us more favorable? |
| What do you love about QA? |
| API testing is increasing in demand and should be included in questions. |
| What do you see as your team role and how can you contribute to our team's success? |
| Ask about industry standard terms the applicant is familiar with. Then follow-up asking them why those terms are important. If nothing occurs to them then start with some general terms and ask how to apply them: Whitebox vs. Blackbox or Unit vs. Integration vs. System tests. Then ask what they would expect to catch with each approach. |
| What is your drive to succeed? |
| What's the most useful criticism you've received? |
| How do you know if you've tested everything? |
| What is an ideal you would like to work with? |
| Why do you want to be a tester or Test Coordinator? |
| What is the hardest thing you worked on? |
| What are you trying to communicate with your test results summary? |
| The importance of testing and understanding the integration with other system, also being able to investigate any issues -- checking logs, webservice/api's, sql, backend/frontend, end to end testing, testing smart during regression testing .... How one ensures they cover these processes and keeping the quality standard a priority. |
| What have you done at your current or past job, that proved to not only your bosses but to yourself that you really know what you are doing? |
| Find out how they acknowledge their failures. |
| Interview should be based on technical skills and not personal lifestyles |
| What is your past testing experience? |
| What are the different categories of testing software? |
| Browser details, cookies, developer tools. |
| Why automation is important and its role in current organization and using it smartly vs just using it as it is the trend or required by Agile? Explain in few words! |
| How can you improve the process of Software Testing? |
| What does this issue mean? |
| What is the number 1 test process improvement you would recommend? |
| What are two testing principles? Explain them in your own words. |
| Debugging and quality management. |
| What software have you used? |
| What are the key aspects of being a tester? |
| How would you go about testing new code without documentation? |
| Refute the following statement: Since everything is Agile these days, and teams work on short Sprints or even Continuous Integration, any bugs that slip through will be found and fixed fast. So there is no real value to testing. |
| Apart from above questions asked, we should get to learn the content of a test case design template from a requirement doc (i am not talking about TCD techniques like ecp, bva, decision tables, etc) using a tabular format. ISO 29119 is not the one which everyone follows, so please generalize the test case template more in a tabular format with necessary column names. |
| What is your testing experience? |
| How would you assert your findings from testing to the developer or the team? |
| Is time alotted in test plan for regression testing? |
| Soft skills questions! Soft skills are so so so important for a tester. You can have all the technical knowledge in the world but if you can’t communicate with your audience and nurture relationships correctly, the effort is futile. We’ve hired many testers with tons of technical skills, but because of lack of soft skills, they weren’t a fit. |
| What steps can you take to improve the quality of your testing? |
| What does software quality mean to you? |
| Why do you like software testing? |
| How do you interact/question developers? |
| Would you report a defect found on a system feature that's out of your scope? |
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I think is good to give candidate a sample requirement document close to what the company is doing, ask them to create as many scenario/test cases as possible, then discuss from there. This can help the interviewer to analyze the candidate skills in requirement analysis, creating scenario/test cases as well as the technique that they know to derive test cases. This is important since this is their main task as tester. |
| Risk analysis questions should be asked. |
| How can we improve our testing coverage ? |
| 7 testing principles. |
| What are the different approaches used to write the test cases and how do you make user that full test coverage is achieved? |
| Only twice have I actually been asked to test an application or website as a part of the technical interview. The second time was actually working with team members explaining my thought process as I did it. I’ve participated as an interviewer once and you really understand the interviewees skills when done. |
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I think the purpose of the meeting is about looking for right people. Thus, we should define a suite of questions that cover all aspect that we need. The QA Engineer here need to understand and good at quality process (agile), manual testing (especially exploratory testing), API testing, DB testing, test automation (we apply all test levels following automated test pyramid: unit test, integration test, UI test (system), system integration testing), and so on. So, our suite of questions covers all above aspects. |
| Functional, Regression, Retesting, Ad-hoc, Somke and sanity. |
| What can you do for us that other candidates can’t? |
| Do you know the good qualities of a software tester? |
| Explain your way to communicate with Dev. |
| All bug related questions. |
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The interviewer need to ask questions more often by giving the present situation or according to the requirement(s) how a person can handle or write test cases and beyond rather than asking how many test cases you have written previously. In short the interviewer emphasis should be on current requirements scenario and there by assess the response given by the interviewee. |
| How would you handle two disagreeing stakeholders? What would be you approach? |
| What is the difference between unit testing,functional testing and user acceptance testing? |
| What would you like to do 5 years from now in IT? |
| Logic based questions should also be used as there are so many in course syllabus. |
| How do you know that your testing the right things at the right level of detail in an environment which has limited documentation? |
| How do you prioritize work from multiple projects/clients going on in parallel? |
| What do you think is the number one character trait a tester should possess? |
| Refer Concepts like testing methodology, SDLC, SQL Joins |
| Determine what their experience is in QA, QC and Testing? Ask what formal training they've had. Ask applicant what their approach would be in developing a test plan. Ask how they would approach a cross-team project with several requirements/deliverables. For instance, a large project that involves build/configuration as well as coding or development. |
| How do you know you are done testing? In other words, how do you know you are ready for release? (Usually leads into a good discussion about satisfying requirements, metrics, and release criteria.) |
| Give me some examples of how the test process can be more efficient. |
| Tell me about yourself. |
| I'd like to see more of an importance placed on soft skills and analysis skills. I find QA acting as a detective and team negotiator, especially in an agile environment that is trying to implement DevOps. |
| Why did you like your last job? |
| When do you do regression testing and retesting. Explain the difference. |
| Some simple sql queries. |
| As a tester, Do you have a plan to improve your skills by yourself or you will let this improve depends on your company?! |
| How would you go about obtaining management support for automation? |
| Questions about how well an individual understands his or her own strengths and weeknesses. |
| How do you approach devs with the bug (communication .. testers often FEAR this). |
| Which tools do you have at hand, to surround a bug, given that you have the code ... or explanatory? |
| Are you able to write a little API-test youself? |
| For advanced levels, draw a basic software development lifecycle showing quality integration points. |
| If you were asked to verify "X", what are some things you would consider during your Validation/Verification process (example: Date field)? |
| Describe how you would go about testing software when no requirements are made available to you? Obtain domain knowledge (possibly from a subject matter expert (SME)). Familiarization with previous version of the software and identify the differences. Attend development engineering and business management meetings to acquire both the internal workings of the software (from engineering) and the business use cases (from BM). Probe defect reporting system for types of problems reported and ones corrected in the newest version. Obtain DIAL (Day In A Life) scenarios to determine how the customers use the software today. Obtain previous generated test plans for test scenarios and known areas prone to errors. Obtain any customer facing documentation. Obtain any Power Point presentation of the software. Perform exploratory testing. |
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Identify ways to increase the quality of the software without testing it 1. Code complexity/coverage tools can be used to identify extremely complicated software or used to find unreachable code. 2. Requirements analysis 3. Code and design walkthroughs 4. Coding standards 5. Peer reviews 6. During development, software compiler options configured and set to identify undeclared variables |
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What do you test when there is very little time to test? Risk analysis - Prioritize – Ensure life and financial portions work. Ensure Day-In-A-Life (DIAL) scenarios work. Newly added features, though you can argue that this may not be so critical to test. The reason why, and this depends on the feature itself, is that if the customer never had this feature then they may not care so much if it does not work. On the other hand, if you advertising this new feature or this new feature is a requirement of the software, then it better work. Determine the minimal amount of test cases to perform. |
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Describe the deliverables that the software test organization provides? Test documentation, schedules, risk assessments, auto-test software, problem reports, metrics, test summary report, lessons-learned data. |
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Tell me about current/your previous organization's quality assurance and testing maturity (if necessary ask the following specific questions. All answers are “Yes”) 1. is s/w development and testing separate from product? 2. are functional requirements written during analysis phase? 3. does your organization follow any development process such as CMM or RUP? 4. do you perform user acceptance testing within the test environment? 5. do you perform reviews of requirements? 6. are you involved in design reviews? 7. does your s/w development process conduct design reviews of functional requirements? 8. do you perform system testing with independent test team in separate test environment? 9. do you use a defect tracking system? 10. do you create test plans and user acceptance tests? 11. do the developers review the test and acceptance test plans? 12. do you use marketing material in developing your test plans? 13. do you receive use cases from marketing on how the software is to be used? 14. do you have a test management system? (manages tests run, success, fail, not run, etc) 15. is there a release-to-test procedure? 16. do you receive software release notes (in consistent and meaningful way)? 17. do you perform regression testing? 18. do developers do unit testing? 19. do developers have unit test plans, approved by system test? 20. do developers have “pre-release to test” criteria? 21. do you have “entry” and “exit” criteria ? Entry into system test, exit from system test 22. does your organization use requirement management tools? 23. do you perform post-release audits? 24. do you perform and present metrics on a release-by-release basis’s? 25. do you apply a formal test methodology? 26. does your test team use various methodologies to reduce the number of test cases needed? 27. does your organization perform code reviews? 28. does your organization use code coverage tools? 29. does your test group have a training budget and policy (for domain, system test, technology)? 30. does your test group go on customer visits? 31. does your test group have a procedure for getting new testers up-to-speed? |
| Tell us about your biggest "miss". (ie. the biggest error that made it to PROD on an application you tested). Also, how often have you stopped a release from going to Production due to an error you found last minute? (Could be phrased differently but essentially, we need to know that a QA person is principled and will stand up for quality when maybe others won't). |
| Some tricky code-related question or any negative-testing approach or simple problem solving to test applicant's way of thinking. |
| Understanding about the use cases and test design accordingly. |
| Explain which automated software testing tools you have used and how you used them? |
| Stop asking how they handled adversity and give them a scenario. EVERY SCENARIO IS DIFFERENT. |
| Tell me about the most recent time that you did something to stay current in your area of expertise. |
| What was the last thing you learned? (Doesn't have to be software related.) |
| How will you conduct Risk Analysis? |
| Why do you want to be a Tester? |
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