Be ready for your first QA interview

Today, I’m not going to explain all the QA interview questions & answers. You can just google and find thousands of QA interview questions. By this post, I wish to share my experience about local QA interviewer’s approach. Also, I want to tell you the way of facing an QA interview.

Tip : Before the interview, search about company and their business.  That will be a good foundation for your preparation.

• Most of the time, First interview question would be “Can you describe about yourself?”. They want to know details you didn’t mention in your CV. At the same time, they want to check your Language proficiency. Don’t waste much time by telling your personal details and by repeating the details in CV. Just tell about you briefly and describe more about your technical/professional background.
• One of a basic QA interview question is explain OOP concepts/software development life cycle/QA life cycle or bug life cycle. Check below images to take an idea.

SDLC	QA life cycle	Bug life cycle

• They may ask about testing types. There are plenty of testing types. But basically, you need to know below list of test types.

1. Unit testing – Testing individual component or module by developers.
2. Integration testing – Test the application after integrated(combined) all the components and modules.
3. Regression testing – After new feature added/changed or fix a bug, test the application to make sure nothing break due to that modification.
4. Smoke testing – A Quick test to verify the most important functionalities of an application are working.
5. Black box testing – Without knowledge of internal logic of a system, just test the functionality against requirement.
6. White box testing – With knowledge of internal logic of a system, test the internal structure and behavior.

• A very common interview question is, “What is the difference between load and performance tests?”. To answer that question, you need to know what is load testing and what is performance testing.

1. Load testing –Check the maximum no of requests can handle by a system per unit period. In simple words, what is the maximum no of users can handle by an application when they use same functionality at the same time.
2. Performance testing – Test the response time of a system. Again, in simple words, how fast users are getting results from the system. simply, test the speed of a system.

• Another very famous set of questions are,

1. What is the different between QA and QC?
2. What is the different between Bug and Defect?
3. What is the different between severity and priority?

          You can easily find the answers from google.

• If you are questioned or not, any QA engineer should know the formats of test plan document and test case document. So, get to know that before you going for the interview.
• Also, you will be questioned about the entry/exit criteria. That is, two different criteria to check before and after the testing conduct.

1. Entry criteria – Minimum set of conditions should be set to start the testing. (example –unit testing is finished, Test plan and Test case documents are ready, Testing environment is ready…etc )
2. Exit criteria – Minimum set of conditions should be set to close the testing. (example – No major defects are pending, All test cases are passed, …etc )

• You will be definitely questioned about bug tracking tools. At least you have to the basics and fields of a bug tracking tool such as JIRA, Bugzilla, Mantis, flyspray …..etc
• After questioning all above basics, now you will be taken to check more technical skills. For that you may ask to write basic sql queries or ask about different protocol types/ security testing or SQL injection testing methods.
• Finally, they will ask about your experience of QA tool and technologies. For a person who going to his first QA interview has nothing to say about that. but at least you have to google & take a basic understanding about tools/technologies like selenium, QTP, Quality center, load runner, URL validation tools, UI testing tools… etc. 

From My next post I hope to discuss about these tools and technologies. 
Till then, have a nice day! Good luck!