Do you recall a question from your software testing interview that you thought was very unusual or odd? What was it?
AT*SQA surveyed software testers and QA analysts, asking if they recalled any unusual or odd questions during their software testing or QA analyst interviews. Below are their responses.| Do you have programming skills? |
| If money is not a concern ... what is your passion? |
| What's the difference between class and object in Python? |
| If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be and why? |
| What don't you like about QA? |
| What is your biggest accomplishment and what did you learn from it? |
| How would you test a device that changes apples to oranges? |
| Expectation to build test cases on random objects like a coke machine. |
| Do you have any healthcare background? |
| Why did you attend technical school instead of 4 yr college? |
| Do you have family? |
| Do you feel you can do my job based on this interview? |
| Two people are stuck and require assistance. To help them, design a vehicle which must travel along a mostly-level surface at a speed of 2-5 mph and hold at least 2 people. What do you build? (The answer was 'an elevator') |
| Recall your most stressful moment and how it affected your work. |
| How much overtime do you spend in testing? |
| What is the most interesting bug you've found in your career? |
| Are you well aware of Agile Environment? |
| Are you morally okay with the kind of product the company makes? |
| Can we do regression in Agile environment? |
| How would you test a stapler? |
| If you were a pizza topping what topping would you be? |
| Logic puzzles. |
| If you could choose a superpower, what would it be? |
| Have you ever scrapped the entire test plan in your career? |
| How would you test the temperature of the room if you didn't have a thermometer? |
| How would you solve this riddle/problem? |
| What is your favorite bug and how did you find it? |
| How would you rob an art museum? |
| If I asked you to run a tabletop game this weekend that you'd never run or played before, what do you need to know? |
| Explain how to test a toaster. |
| If you were a tree what kind of tree would you be? |
| What is the objective of Performance Testing? |
| What are the differences between testing and quality assurance? |
| Where do you see yourself in three years? |
| What's your favorite vegetable? |
| How would you test a Enterprise Level Cloud Software? |
| A bad king has a cellar of 1000 bottles of delightful and very expensive wine. A neighbouring queen plots to kill the bad king and sends a servant to poison the wine. Fortunately (or say unfortunately) the bad king's guards catch the servant after he has only poisoned one bottle. Alas, the guards don't know which bottle but know that the poison is so strong that even if diluted 100,000 times it would still kill the king. Furthermore, it takes around a month to have an effect. The bad king decides he will buy some slaves to drink the wine. Being a clever bad king he knows he need only buy 10 slaves and will still be able to drink the rest of the wine (999 bottles) at his anniversary party in 5 weeks time. Explain what is in the mind of the king, how will he be able to do so? |
| Odd questions specific to the system under test (seeking very specific skill set/experience). |
| Overly technical questions, like how does this library do task X. Wanting a QA to have deep and intimate knowledge of a lot specific technology never made any sense to me. Being able to learn, listen, or demonstrate resourcefulness should be emphasized over specific tech details. |
| Whats your favorite animal? |
| Do you like working with developers? |
| I had a question about how I get along with others in antagonistic relationships. I think they were avoiding the possibility of tension between QA and developers. |
| If your walking up a hill and stumble do you get right back up and continue or do you rest then get up? |
| Do you like working alone or with a team? |
| What do you usually talk about in your car pool while going back home? About work or something else? |
| What makes a good test case? |
| Who is your favorite superhero? |
| What is the one facet that constitutes the perfect test case? |
| Was asked about personal hobbies. |
| What is Android build app extension name? |
| Does testing eliminate defects 100%? |
| About new automation tools. |
| Why are manhole covers round in shape? |
| Why did you choose software testing as career? |
| Why is this (whatever) tool getting this issue (rare)? |
| What did you want to be when you were 5 years old? |
| What has been you career highlight as a tester? |
| What colour were the pictures in the waiting area? |
| Where do you see yourself in 5 years? (It was a 1 year contract). |
| How to figure out how many ping pong balls on a bus |
| If you had to write a test case about getting to this interview. What would be the steps? |
| Sometimes the interviewer gets confused with test case and use case. |
| How you handle different environments? |
| Some behavioral questions. |
| How would you test something that requires a specific temperature - hot and cold? |
| The "hot light bulb" question. |
| Describe a time when you had to break bad news to someone. |
| Provide the steps to building a sandwich. |
| If a software team practices TDD, does this mean that the software produced by the team will be bug free? |
| How much testing is required? |
| How do you write test cases when you don't have any document on requirements (no business, functional, software specification document)? |
| Explain the tools and steps to make a pb&j sandwich to someone who has never made / eaten a sandwich. |
| What would you do when developers rejected your reported bugs? |
| What projects have you done in software testing? |
| Are you able to perform 1000 test per day? |
| All java related questions. |
| How many test cases you have written in your previous project? |
| Do you do better in a group setting socially or a one on one setting? |
| Are you familiar with exception? |
| Why is a street manhole round? (round can't fall in the hole no matter which way you have it ) |
| Would you rather work for a women or a man? |
| How to configured data base to application steps to define |
| If you were a part on a bicycle, what part would you be and why? |
| Do you think the test team should always have an adversarial relationship with developers? |
| How fast can you automate all of our test cases? |
| How long will it take for you to convert all of our no longer working Selenium scripts to our new tool that we have not bought yet? |
| How to manage conflict amongst team members. |
| If you have very less time and you have to meet the deadline so how can you handle the situation? |
| How do you test web applications? |
| This may be a little dated, but I used to ask candidates how they would test a boombox, or a CD player, or even a telephone - just to see their creativity in coming up with test cases (both hardware and software) for something they are fairly familiar with. Could use something like headphones for a more updated example. |
| Do you consider it necessary to get help from domain experts to test this solution, and if so, given that they are not willing to contribute - how would you tackle that challenge? |
| Testcases for a manhole. |
| Why are manhole covers round? |
| Why are you here? |
| How would you handle a problem employee when the position is not a management position? |
| What is your marital status? |
| For an automation role I was asked to fix a failed test sequence. The challenge was to question the interviewer about the automation sequence to learn test cases were executing out of order, causing a setup dependency issue. My solution was an automated sort of test cases prior to execution. |
| Leadership is trending to only value Automated testing. But they don't understand its limitations or the tendency for QA engineers to think like developers and trying to "make the test work" vs. creating a test to catch bugs. As a question it would be nice for QA staff to be able to answer which type of testing is more valuable and why? |
| What is exploratory testing? |
| To write down a complex MySQL query that was not relevant to the position I applied. |
| Write a program. |
| Do you like to go out for lunch or do you prefer to bring your lunch every day? |
| What would you use to determine the Most Critical Web Application Security Risks? |
| What level of coverage is more thorough: branch coverage or decision coverage? |
| What is the difference between functional and non-functional security testing? |
| Attributes of test strategy and test plan |
| Are you a Bruins fan? |
| How do you test a pencil? |
| What would I do if requirements are vague? |
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