Lately, I have to conduct lots of interviews for various positions in the QA organizations which I lead. One of the most popular roles that people want is Software Developer in Test. Below I will share what usually companies want from the candidates and what are the primary responsibilities. Sharing the questions and the information I hope that I will help some of you who want to prepare better for your future interviews.
I won’t provide the answers to the questions since I believe this is part of the journey to learn what you don’t know.
As part of the professional services we provide at BELLATRIX, we consult companies and help them to improve their QA process and set up an automated testing infrastructure. After the initial review process and giving improvement recommendations for some companies we need to hire new talents that can help the company to scale-up the solutions we provided. Others don’t want to hire people, so they hire our company to do the job. Which path you will choose if you are a manager depends on the company’s/product’s context and how much money it will cost you.
Main Responsibilities
Understand both the business objectives and the technical implementation of the company’s software product line;
Have a critical eye for detail and be motivated to explore our products in pursuit of identifying problems that will be important for our customers;
Day-to-Day Duties Time Distribution
50% Implementing automated tests for the newly developed features;
20% maintaining the available automated test suites;
10% Analyzing the results of regular automated tests executions;
20% Maintaining and extending the automation testing framework and tools;
Core Requirements
Previous experience in test automation or software development – 3 years;
Knowledge of C# or Java – intermediate level;
Understanding the principles of OOP;
Experience writing locators (XPath, CSS Selectors);
Strong knowledge of software QA methodologies, tools and processes;
Knowledge of CI/CT. Know how to use Jenkins (or other build server);
An endless passion for personal and professional development;
Good working level of English;
Advantages
Certification of ISTQB is a plus;
Work experience with WebDriver or Appium;
Knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript;
University degree in the area of Information Technologies or Computer Science;
Knowledge of Transact-SQL;
Knowledge of .NET Core and Entity Framework Core;
Of course, all of these responsibilities, requirements, and advantages can vary from team to team and from company to company. Also, the technology stack can be slightly different.
Testing Fundamentals Interview Questions
The first set of questions are regarding basic knowledge about testing fundamentals. I believe that you cannot be a good test automation engineer developing automated tests if you cannot do manual testing or cannot explain some of the basic testing concepts.
What is Black box testing? What are the different black box testing techniques?
What is Equivalence partitioning testing?
What are the different test levels?
Difference between retesting and regression testing?
What do you include as information in a bug report?
Explain in a testing project what testing activities would you automate?
How would you estimate the amount of re-testing likely to be required?
In what order should tests be run?
Explain the difference between Functional testing and Non-Functional testing.
Explain Bug cycle.
Explain the terms Stress Testing and Load testing.
What do you understand by Exploratory Testing? When is it performed?
For any web application, what are the possible login features that should be tested?
List the seven testing principles. Explain.
What is the full form of CMMI?
Difference between severity and priority?
What is meant by Entry Criteria and Exit Criteria in software testing?
What is penetration testing?
What is Endurance testing or Soak testing?
What is Globalization testing?
What is the difference between Smoke and Sanity testing?
What is Cyclomatic Complexity?
What is Code Coverage?
What is the role of QA in project development?
Automated Testing Interview Questions
What is regression testing?
How would you do a load test?- What scenarios? What measurement will you use?
How do you identify the test cases which are suitable for automation?
What is a framework?
What are the attributes of a good framework?
How would you handle test data information- URL, login, passwords per different test environments?
How would you verify different aspects of data in the tests?
What would be your first step to determine what to automate in this new project? How would you prioritize them?
How would you execute all of the tests? Which tools would you use and why?
What are the different types of waits available in WebDriver?
When should I use Selenium Grid?
How many assertions would you place in automated tests? Why? Would this vary based on the tested use case?
What kind of tests should NOT be automated?
Against what type of environment would you run your tests? What would be your requirements?
If you have the task to perform a load test, against what test environment would you execute these tests?
What is the connection between WebDriver, WinAppDriver and Appium?
What are the DesiredCapabilities and what for we use them?
What would you use to run your tests in a headless mode?
How would you check if an element is visible on the page?
How would you check if a button is disabled on a page?
If your tests are flaky because your web pages execute lots of AJAX requests what would you do to stabilize them?
What is the role of the test automation engineer?
If you have more junior colleagues QAs what would be a sample agenda for them to get started with testing and test automation?
If you have to teach your developer colleagues about QA what would be your steps?
If you have an existing product with many features, how would you determine what to start automating?
Since you cannot automate everything through UI, how would you check whether some calculations are correct or not? For example, how would you arrange your test data- products before your test runs?
C# OOP Interview Questions
The role of the software developer in tests includes mainly programming so we need to make sure that the candidate can code.
What is Inheritance?
Define a constructor?
Difference between overloading and overriding?
Difference between a class and an object?
What are the access modifiers?
What does the keyword virtual represented in the method definition?
Whether static method can use non-static members?
How many instances can be created for an abstract class?
What is a static constructor?
Does .NET support multiple inheritance?
What is LSP (Liskov Substitution Principle) and what are some examples of its use (good and bad)?
How is exception handling implemented in C#?
What are Boxing and Unboxing?
What is Reflection in C#?
What is a generic class?
What is a deadlock?
What is serialization?
How will you transform a JSON file to C# objects?
What is the difference between constants and read-only?
What are sealed classes in C#?
Can a private virtual method be overridden?
DB SQL Interview Questions
Depending on the company sometimes you need to have at least basic knowledge about data bases, web APIs or both.
What is a primary key?
What is a foreign key?
What is a join?
What is a Left Join?
What is a stored procedure?
What is a constraint?
What is an ALIAS command?
