The 10 Best QA Engineer Interview Questions in 2023
Are you hiring your next QA engineer? If so, you need the top QA engineer interview questions. Read on for our 10 best questions to ask at your next interview.
Interviewing QA engineers
QA or quality assurance engineering aims to improve the software development process by detecting errors in products and preventing them from occurring again. Typical QA engineering tasks include checking if a product complies with its requirements, assessing risks, planning tests, brainstorming ideas to improve product quality, and analyzing test results.
How do you identify a great QA engineer, though? Here are the top QA interview questions for junior QA engineers.
Beginner QA engineer interview questions
What interview questions should you ask a junior QA engineer? Here are our top QA interview questions for freshers!
1. Explain the difference between Quality Assurance, Quality Control, and Testing.
Answer:
Quality Assurance is all about planning and defining how quality processes will be monitored and implemented. In other words, it sets the quality standards of projects.
Quality Control, on the other hand, is all about finding defects and giving suggestions to improve software quality. Quality Control is often established by Quality Assurance.
Testing, again, is the process of finding bugs or defects. Testing establishes if the software meets the requirements set by the user and the organization’s standards. Testers act as quality gatekeepers.
2. What does the Quality Assurance process lifecycle look like?
Answer:
Every Quality Assurance process involves the PDCa or Plan Do Check Act cycle. This is what the cycle looks like:
Plan: Quality Assurance ensures that planning takes into consideration product quality, when an organization is planning and developing process-related objectives and methods for providing a high-quality final product.
Do: The Do phase involves process development and testing and doing changes to processes. Quality Assurance engineers make sure that the processes maintain product quality.
Check: This phase is all about monitoring, modifying and checking to see if processes achieve their intended goals. Quality Assurance focuses on checking processes to ensure that no defects are missed.
Act: The Quality Assurance engineer takes steps to improve processes.
3. Explain the difference between a Test Plan and a Test Strategy.
Answer:
The Test Plan shows how testing should be performed for a certain application in a project. Test Strategy, on the other hand, is higher level and shows the overall testing approach.
4. Explain the difference between validation, verification and bug checking in software testing.
Answer:
Software testing aims to verify, validate and check for bugs. Verification means the evaluation of how close the software is to its requirements. Validation, again, involves the assessment of the requirements to find out if they are what the customer initially wanted. Bug checking is all about finding something that shouldn’t have happened, but happened.
5. What is meant by build and release in Quality Assurance?
Answer:
Build means that a software or application is ready to be tested. When developers have created software or added on a functionality, they hand it over to testers. That’s why the build phase is a broad phase.
Release refers to the finalized application after development and testing. At this stage, the testing team verifies the program and releases it to customers. Every release can have multiple builds.
6. How do you organize your work?
Answer:
QA is a repetitive process and requires strong project management skills. It is, in other words, essential that your candidate is organized. Do they use checklists? Do they add to the checklists throughout the Quality Assurance process? How do they start with requirements? How do they arrange their priorities?
Advanced QA engineer interview questions
What are the top senior QA engineer interview questions? Here are the best questions to ask at your next interview.
7. How much time is sufficient for a release test?
Answer:
Ask candidates to give an example so that they refer back to their experience and how they’ve previously gotten jobs done under pressure. Probe what other steps they would have taken if they’d been given a bit more time.
8. What is monkey testing in Quality Assurance?
Answer:
Monkey testing refers to a software testing technique where the tester inserts random inputs into the software application without using predefined test cases. They then observe the software program’s behavior.
Monkey testing is all about using experimental ways to find faults in software. It can be automated so that random inputs are produced to test the system’s behavior. It’s particularly useful when stress or load testing.
There are two monkey testing categories. These are smart monkeys and dumb monkeys.
Smart monkeys refer to monkeys that have a basic understanding of the application and they know which application pages will redirect where and which inputs are valid or not. They can also report errors as bugs.
Dumb monkeys, on the other hand, don’t know the application at all. They give random inputs without knowledge of the functioning or interface of an application. However, they discover bugs such as environmental failure or hardware failure.
9. What is gorilla testing?
Answer:
Gorilla testing, also known as Torture Testing, Fault Tolerance Testing, and Frustrating Testing, is a software testing method where a module is tested with random inputs. This way, the module’s operations are checked. Gorilla testing is manual and done over and over.
10. What is testware?
Answer:
Testware is a software collection that is created for software testing automation. Application software and utilities that work together that don’t contribute to operational purposes but that work together to test software are referred to as testware. In other words, testware isn’t a static configuration but a working environment. Verification and validation testing methodologies are used to create testware and it consists of code, binaries, test cases, reports, and plans. Testware needs to be preserved and maintained as part of the direction of a configuration management system.
Over to you!
There you have it! Those are the top QA engineer interview questions you need for your technical interviews.
While some of these questions focus on the technical aspects of Quality Assurance, your interviews aren’t primarily about assessing candidates’ technical skills. Instead, you need technical skills assessments for that.
And at CodeSubmit, we offer various skill assessment tests, including take-home challenges and pair programming.
Want to learn more?