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Harmanjot Singh
Harmanjot Singh

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These Interview Questions On Automation Testing Will Land You in Your Dream Job!

The Automation Tester or QA (Quality Assurance) plans and carries out software tests to check if a computer program is working appropriately. They look for risks of software errors, detect incidents and report them to the team of programmers. They evaluate the overall performance of the software and suggest ways to improve it.

In this article, we will share some questions that you can ask a tester.

Question: What is testing for you?
Answer: The objective of this question is to know the vision that the candidate has about what testing is. The fundamental thing that the candidate should answer is that testing is processes, methodologies, and tools to identify errors in the software so that they can be corrected before the end-user uses it.

Question: Why did you decide to be a tester?
Answer: This question is to identify that the candidate is passionate about their profession. The best professionals are those who like what they do.

Question: Have you done requirements analysis?
Answer: Requirement analysis is to download on paper what are the technological needs that a company has. In other words, what should the system have to meet the customer's requirements?

This is important so that later the tester can define the test cases.

Question: Have you designed test cases?
Answer: Test cases are the conditions or variables under which a tester determines if an application, or functionality of that application, is satisfactory.

In simpler words, they are the guide or standards that the tester uses to determine if a program works correctly or not.

Question: What types of tests are there?
Answer: Performing software tests allows the tester to determine that the system meets the customer's requirements and to identify an error before it reaches the end-user.

In testing, there are functional and non-functional tests.

These are some of the tests that the candidate could mention.

Functional testing
Unit Tests: They ensure that each code cell developed in a component gives the right results.
Component testing: its objective is to verify the functionalities and/or usability of the components.
Smoke tests: they are carried out to verify if the most significant functionalities of the application work or not.
Integration test: This is one of the most common types of bump test and is performed in an automated way. They are done to test individual components to verify how the modules, which work individually, work when they are integrated.
Regression testing: The goal of these tests is to find errors that may have been accidentally introduced into the existing build.
Acceptance testing: real users use the software to verify that it fulfills the required tasks in a real environment.

Non-functional tests
Compatibility tests: They are used to verify the operation of a system in different environments. For example, test a web application in different browsers such as Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
Load tests: validate that the response of an application is good when it is being used by several users simultaneously. For example, test the application with 100 users.
Performance tests: Calculate the response to the application with different user numbers. Test the application with 1, 10, or 100 users.
Stress tests: check how many users an application can support simultaneously without presenting errors.

Question: What are the severity levels of the bugs?
Answer: The tester must be able to differentiate the severity level of a bug. A bug is an error in the program code that causes the system to malfunction.

The severity levels are ...

Low - The error will not cause a noticeable system failure

Minor - Results in some unexpected or unwanted behavior, but not enough to disrupt system operation

Major: error capable of collapsing large parts of the system

Critical - Error capable of triggering a complete system shutdown

Question: What tools do you use to perform automated tests?
Answer: Some of the tools used to perform automated testing are:

Selenium
Katalon Studio
UFT One
TestComplete
SOAP
Appium

Question: How would you report a bug?
Answer: Every company has a methodology for reporting a bug to the development team. Some of the fundamental points that a bug report should include are:

Description of the error
Steps to follow to replicate the error. If the developer wanted to see the bug himself, what he has to do to replicate it.
Acceptable result. What should happen in the application if it is built correctly.
Evidence of the error. Images or video of the error.

Question: What do you do when a programmer disagrees with your feedback?
Answer: Part of the tester's job is to let the development team know that there are bugs in the system code. Sometimes the programmer can take personal advice from the tester to tell him that his code is not right. The tester must be able to mediate these situations to avoid friction in the equipment. This question will help you to know how the candidate reacts when there are conflicts with his co-workers.

Question: Have there been false positives in automated tests? What should I do if a false alarm occurs?
Answer: There have been false positives. Sometimes the automated test report shows that an error was found. Actually, run the manual tests to confirm that the error does not exist.

The reasons for false positives are generally:

  1. The positioning of the element is unstable and the stability of the script should be improved as much as possible;

  2. The development updated the page but the test was not updated and it was kept on time.

Question: During the automated testing process, what problems did you encounter and how to solve them?
Answer:
Frequently change the page, often modify the code in the page object class
Automated tests have occasionally had false positives.
Automated test coverage results: Jenkins creates time-based folders
Automatic test code maintenance is more troublesome
Automated tests to compare data from the database.

Question: What framework does the latest company use for automated testing?
Answer: You can name one of the following:

python + selenium + unit test + HTML test runner
python + selenium + pytest + allure
robot framework + Selenium2Library

Question: How to take a screenshot in Selenium and how to take a screenshot if the use case does not run?
Answer: Selenium provides a get_screenshot_as_file () method to take screenshots. Generally used in conjunction with try / except to catch exceptions to take screenshots of errors.

There you have it! Some questions to interview an automation tester. The goal of the recruiter asking technical questions in an interview is not to validate the candidate's technical knowledge. This part has to be done by the IT team.

Asking the candidate technical questions will allow you to assess their soft skills to explain complex technical terms to a non-technical person. Also, when you ask the candidate technical questions, you better understand the profile you are recruiting. And when you better understand the profile of your vacancy, you can more easily identify good candidates for your job offer.

If you are finding automation testing courses online, we have a recommendation for you. Janbask Training is a platform where you can learn several courses with automation testing courses online without much load on your budget. Their live classes are led by industry experts and they assign live projects to upskill your practical knowledge.

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