Being a Quality Analyst is not as easy as it sounds. However, if you are up for it, then you may want to refer to the below technical as well as analytical QA interview questions and answers to make an outstanding mark during the interview. Going through this write-up would help you clear your HR interview round as well as personal interviews in QA profile. So, let’s begin!
1. What motivates you to do your best job?
For some money is a driving force, for some it is the person leading them, but the ideal motivation must be your passion. The zest to work towards what you love. As the saying goes by, ‘Do what you love, and you won’t have to work a day.’ Attain expertise in your field, know it in and out and you’ll already be halfway down doing your best because you’ll know it the best.
2. What do you find most frustrating at your current work?
The freedom to innovate. You can know things and feel like doing it your way, but you aren’t allowed to add your creative touch up. Being a person with innovative concepts, it is frustrating at times. The opportunity to grow and learn becomes limited. But at the end of the day, I am still able to fulfill what I’m asked to, so I stay contended.
3. What do you do when you have a great deal of work to accomplish in a short period of time?
The right thing to do is increase your efficiency and try finishing it as soon as possible. But the most important thing is what not to do. Try not to lose your patience and panic. It is like a cherry on the top of existing work. Time management and maintaining your calm is required. Stay focused, get yourself a cup of coffee and you’ll see yourself speeding up and your worries flying away.
4. What do you find most challenging in working with others?
People don’t accept a different approach and an alternative viewpoint which leads to ego clashes. Undoubtedly, this is a major reason why people aren’t able to work in a team. Everyone wants to be a leader and no one wants to be led. The utmost important thing required while working in a team is – proper management. An important aspect of management in QA or in fact any team is dividing duties depending on expertise and working together towards the goal.
5. Have you managed people in the past? What type of supervision did you give them?
While at college, being a part of the organizing team of the annual college fest, I have both, worked in a team with co-organizers and managed a team of juniors. I was taking care of assigning duties and checking progress. Analysing the strengths and weaknesses of each person, arranging for the things required at a low cost and conducting events, I was handling the core management team of our fest.
6. Describe the best manager you ever had and the worst. What qualities did each of them have?
My best manager was more of a mentor to me. I still remember how he let me experiment with things first, and then told me what the right thing to do was. It gave me a lot of exposure to the real world. I could even have a real conversation with him and it felt like I’m being guided by a pioneer, a friend, and a teacher.
My worst manager, well, I won’t call anyone a bad manager. Because it might be a different approach in running a business or managing things, but you always get to learn something or the other.
7. What should a test or QA plan include?
A software test plan is a basis for testing the system formally. It describes the testing scope and activities to be undertaken while executing the test. Basically, QA plan is a detailed document which puts forth the features to be tested, features not to be tested, a formal introduction accompanied by references, test items, the approach used, requirements, deliverables, pass/fail criteria. It also covers schedule, training needs, risks and dependencies, responsibilities and approval. One important requirement is that it must have a unique test identifier to distinguish from other test plans.
8. What is a Test Case and what should it include?
As the name suggests, the Test Case is a set of conditions under which it would be easier to determine if the system under testing is working correctly or not. It comes in a document which will include important details like the case summary, requirements, prerequisites, data used, the procedure is undertaken, results obtained and the conclusion drawn. Apart from the workflow, it also has a creation date, author name, test ID, date of execution and final remarks. However, a good test case must be accurate, economical, traceable, repeatable and reusable. It should be easy to understand and well written covering all the positive and negative scenarios.
9. What is a Use Case and what should it contain?
In layman language, the Use Case is the methodology of how a person ueses the developed process to accomplish his or her task. A use case diagram is a popular way of showcasing the requirements, approach, and result. A use case diagram has three integral components- actors, system, and goal. The actor is the user involved who interacts with the process. The system will list the methods an actor can use. The goal, also called the admin is the successful outcome provided to the user. An admin facilitates this process. A Use Case can use functions like ‘include’ and ‘extend’ to achieve clarity and enhance its functionality. Additional elements that a complex Use Case contains can be stakeholders, preconditions, and triggers.
10. What is Software Testing Life Cycle?
A software testing lifecycle is a process undertaken after the software development lifecycle (SDLC). STLC includes the testing process being executed in a systematic and planned manner. The steps involved in an STLC are requirement analysis, test planning, test case development, environment setup, test execution and test cycle closure. Every step has its own significance which adds value in determining and improving the quality of the product.
11. Why is QA important?
QA that is quality assurance, the name speaks for itself. Good quality is the most important service any business can provide its product with and what every end user expects as well. QA involves code inspection, regression testing, and test cases. It assures them that the software is working just fine and is free of defects. A software with bugs or defects released can put any business at stake. It not only takes care of long-term revenues and profitability but builds a good company image too. Hence, it is an inevitable part of software development.
12. How do you decide what to test in an application?
While developing an application, no one wants to leave any stone unturned and might want to test every single aspect of it. But it will only leave you with an ever growing set of test cases. So the ideal thing to work through is to test only those portions which have a higher probability of inducing a defect or which are important from a business point of view. It will cut a lot of test cases and make work easier too.
13. Describe a particularly challenging test issue on a project, why it was challenging and the methodology you used to work through it?
I was recently working on a project to implement face swapping, just like Snapchat has a filter for it. It was working pretty fine on most faces but while testing we realized it was performing poorly when used on faces wearing glasses. It was hard to fix because the training set didn’t have any images with people wearing glasses. To resolve it, we crawled images from websites like lenskart where we were able to find a lot of pictures with people wearing specs and goggles. This new training data wasn’t huge but it significantly improved our program’s accuracy in swapping faces.
14. Why do you want QA Test as a career?
A good QA tester not only requires technical skills like a database, object-oriented analysis, and operating systems but also a good hand at non-technical skills involving analytics, communication and time management. Since I was already passionate towards this subject while at college so I would want to choose a career that offers me the same. Apart from that, the scope of this field is evergreen. Applications will continue to develop and it won’t be deployed until a QA tester waives the green flag, so this is imperative and immortal.
15. What is the role of documentation in QA?
Documentation is not only a necessity but a good practice too. It modularizes the requirements and enhances their repeatability. Specification designs, business rules, inspection reports, configurations etc must be documented so that there it can be brought to use whenever required in the future. Change management can be used for documentation too if possible.
16. How do you know when to stop testing?
Common factors which determine when to stop testing are when a certain number of test cases have passed, bug rate falls below a specified level or the test budget depletes. Deadlines are also set mostly for the same purpose. When the code is covered or beta/alpha test period ends, you know it is time to stop testing.
Hoping that this QA preview would help you during your personal and professional quality check. Needless to say, but before appearing for an interview, practice multiple times, give mock interviews, and when the time comes, sit back, and be professional. Further, you could be asked more intensive questions but with all the aforementioned points in your mind, you’re good to go! All the best!