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Behavioural Questions

Tell me about yourself and your experience

This is the most common question asked in Automation Testing interview. Typical answer goes like below.

I have 10+ years of experience in automation testing. I have worked for clients like RACQ, CTM, Sunsuper, Allianz, Unify, Great Southern Bank. I have vast experience in diverse automation technologies.

Tell about your current role and responsibilities

Currently I work as an automation engineer in XYZ project
Responsibilities include writing tests, executing tests on cloud, checking reports, automation of new tests and Maintainance of tests on Bamboo server and Cross browser testing on browsers and mobile devices.
Tools used in the project are cucumber, groovy, Maven + Java, RestAssured, Appium, Bamboo, Docker, C#.Net + Specflow.

Tell 3 strong qualities and weak qualities

My strong points - I have skills in hot technologies like UFT, Jira, Selenium, Appium, AWS, Docker, Cucumber + Collaberation. So I am right fit for the role. I also have good Work ethics, Flexibility in terms of work, Commitment to work, Honesty and Integrity. I can easily Adapt to New tech stack.
My weak points - I need improvement in Communication and presentation.

Why I should hire you?

I have a Passion for automation. I write tech blogs and books on automation technologies. I also contribute to open source project on github.

What Challenges you faced?

Here are some of the challenges I faced

Ambiguous Requirements of software
People not sticking to Scrum process - e.g. not changing ticket status, not adding enough description and comments on tickets.
Code review process - e.g. In some projects, code review is not being done so debt keeps growing. All team members not following coding guidelines.
Team member conflicts
Weak CI/CD process - Infrequent code Integration, kicking off tests manually after build is deployed, no rollback strategy
Cross browser testing challenges
Flaky results due to Synchronization issues
Dependency on devops to run tests in ci and cd
Technical Challenges - Cross browser challenges, Synchronization, EMAIL VERIFICATION, BIOMETRICS VERIFICATION

Here is the list of concret examples of behavioural questions.

At CTM, code review and coding conventions were not being followed properly. So improved the process.
At unify solutions, Client wanted us to execute regression tests on 10 devices. I convinced them that this is like a burning a fingure and they said let us do risk based testing. 1 device from each OS and 3 screen sizes.
At Allianz, Regression tests took 3 hours to execute. So I optimized test suite by removing non critical tests and also removing hard coded wait statements.
At Sunsuper, lot of code duplication was found in tests. And also They had 500 team city builds. I proposed them that tests can be grouped based on functionality and builds can be reduced. Also scrum tickets did not have proper titles and description. I also recommended them to get rid of old tools like Quality Center and TFS.

Any major Achievements?

Answering this question should be easy. Just explain how you overcame challenges mentioned in above question.

Any conflict of opinion with team member and how you resolved it?

Team was using different builds for testing each API. I told them to group apis in single build to avoid duplicate code. But Team disagreed. So I explained the benefits of grouping APIs and convinced them!

STAR based Questions

STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result.

Pressure situation

Tell me about challenging pressure situation and how did you fix it - Manager asked me to take over the execution of regression suite even though I did not work on it before. So it was a difficult situation. I told her that Since I am doing this first time, I will need assistance from the Team and with the help from team members I was able to complete the task.

Any initiative you took?

any time you went above and beyond?

Lot of tests were failing and not stable. So I took initiative to fix the existing issues in the test and optimized the queries.This was in addition to my existing project work.

Any situation you could have handled in a better way?

I was working on a project independently and my work was not reviewed by anyone until last stage. So I should have proactively asked for the review from someone in other team.

Any defect leaked into production?

I did not test all enum values of an API and for one of the enum, mapping was invalid in database. I think I should have added the test for that scenario.

Technical Interview Questions

Which Tech Stack you used?

You can explain what technologies you used in project. e.g. Azure, JavaScript, React, Selenium, Java, Jira Interviewer may ask follow up question on this techonlogies so you need to be comfertable with answering such questions.
Here are some of the tech stacks used in automation testing projects.

Java + maven + junit + Selenium + cucumber + Postman
Java + gradle + testng + Selenium + Postman
Python + Selenium + Robot framework
C#.net + Selenium + specflow + RestSharp
JavaScript + Selenium + NodeJS API testing
Typescript + Mocha + Chai + Selenium + NodeJS API testing
Java + Selenium + API testing with RestAssured
API testing with ReadyAPI + Performance Testing with Jmeter
C#.Net + Mobile Testing + Appium
Java + Mobile Testing + Appium
JavaScript + Mobile Testing + Appium

How to do performance testing

Tools - Jmeter, Charles Proxy, Fiddler
Threads
Reports
Metrics - Throughput

XPATH vs JSONPath

XPATH AND JSON PATH - https://jsonpath.com/ and http://xpather.com/

Description	XPath	JSONPath
the root object/element	/	$
Current object	.	@
Child operator	/	. or []
Parent Operator	..	N/A
Recursive Descent	//	..
Wildcard	*	*
Attribute access	@	N/A
Subscript Operator	[]	[]
Union Operator	\|	[,]
Array Slice Operator	N/A	[start:end:step]
Filters	[]	?()
Script Expression	N/A	()
Grouping	()	N/A

Explain git workflow

We need to Clone a repository then Create feature branch and make changes in feature branch. Then we need to Build, Deploy to feature url. Tester can test the feature on feature branch.

Important automation testing concepts

UFT - Object repo vs Descripting programming, UFT vs LeanFT, UFT vs Ranorex
Jira - Sprint vs Kanban Board, Jira Workflow, Integration with Version control system, Agile vs Waterfall models, Using code feature to style the text, Epic vs Ticket, Writing filters, Configuring boards and dashboards, creating projects
GIT and GITHUB - Cloning repo, How to commit, pull and push changes, How to resolve conflicts, How to revert the changes, How to view changes, Git branching models, Working on Github, Creating pull requests, Reviewing changes and approving pull requests
Cucumber - Hooks and cucumber options for rerunning failed scenarios, generating reports, tagging scenarios and running specific tags with AND, OR, XOR combination, Gherkin, BDD
Difference between testng and junit - When to use JUnit and TestNG, Various annotations, Creating test skeleton
Difference between maven and gradle - What are the pros and cons of both tools, maven phases and goals, Maven profiles, Maven repo, Maven plugins, View dependency tree
Linux and powershell commands - All important linux commands, Frequent linux tasks that can be automated, Writing shell scripts, Profiles, Shell variables, User variables, Package managers and Installations, Vagrant, Difference between Desktop, VM, vagrant and Docker
Appium vs Selenium - How appium is different, Page object models
Appium on Mac - Running tests on iPhone, iPad simulators
AWS, Bamboo and Docker - Creating EC2 instances and configuring it with docker, bamboo agent process and running tests on it, Bamboo tasks for AWS plugin, Deploy plugin, Teamcity and Jenkins
Jmeter - How to use Jmeter to do performance testing, HTTP config element, Extracting data from JSON responses using JSON extractors, Extracting data from response headers, Using HTTP header elements, Creating thread groups, Generating reports using report elements
Java - core OOPS concepts, Classes vs Interfaces, Generics, static and singlton, multi-threading, collections, Serialization and Reflections, Casting objects and type conversion, Final vs Static, Utility classes, Regular expressions, Useful libraries e.g. apache common, Mustache, Springboot and Database handling, Input and output, File handling
C#.Net - Build management tool - MSBuild, Package management - Nuget, Important namespaces and classes, Data types and type conversion, OOPS concepts, Strings, Regular Expressions, File handling, Collection and Generics, Anonymous methods, Properties (getters and setters),
Javascript - Objects and classes in Javascript, ECMAScript Versions, Javascript frameworks, DOM vs BOM, Events, Apply, call bind, this object, closures, Hoisting variables, including js files in other file
IntelliJ - Tips and shortcuts in IntelliJ IDEA
SQL - all important sql queries, joins, finding unique and duplicates, sql functions, triggers and procedures
Protractor - How to write and execute tests in protractor, Javascript test frameworks
Rest endpoint testing - RestAssured, Postman, SoapUI
Security testing
Optional things - Groovy, Python, Ansible, React and Node.js, NPM, Spring boot, Tosca, TestComplete

What are the Automation testing benefits?

Some of the benefits of automation testing are quick time to test, continuous integration, Accuracy, Regression testing through automation can save lot of time and resources

Automation testing drawbacks and limitations?

Here are limitations and drawbacks of automation testing.

not everything can be automated
false negative test results
Initial investment is more in automation testing
Maintainance costs are high if application is changing frequently
Programming Skills are needed to do automation scripting

Daily activities

Attend daily standup
Understand requirments and ask questions on requirements
Writing functional tests as per user stories or business requirement document
Writing non-functional tests (Performance testing) like throughput and server load
Writing Security test scenarios
Designing automation framework
Version control - git e.g. github, stash, gitlab. git branching stategy, git branch protection rules to enforce pull request reviews, git webhooks - to notify external services when certain event happens, git - add secrets
Test execution and result analysis - We can use report plugin to show graphical reports e.g. Extent report. Tag automation test cases so that filtering is possible. Filtering is also possible based on the test tool that you use.
Raise the bugs with screenshot and video recording and stop the build from progressing to next stage. Regression testing usually is done in SIT and UAT. If the defects are found, we need to work together and fix the defect, retest and then we can deploy the build to next environment e.g. staging or production

Explain Automation Framework

Config manager - variables
logging and Reporting framework
Data modelling
Design pattern - Page object models
CI CD integration - Running tests in cloud e.g. AWS, Azure devops, CI server - Jenkins, Teamcity, Bamboo and Integration of git repo and triggering tests using git post-recieve hook
BDD or TDD - In bdd frameworks, state can be shared between test definitation classes using dependency injection

Build pipeline - creates the build from the source code in a branch e.g. master and creates the build artifacts. Build steps depend on the tech stack. If project is based on maven, you will need to add "mvn test" or if it is nodejs based, you can use "npm test" So you will need to setup build agnets in such a way that all required sdks and tools are available on that agent. e.g. Nodejs and JDK, Macos XCode build tools. Also if you want to run the tests on Safari, you would need the agent based on MacOs Release pipeline - Release pipeline consumes the build artefacts and then deploys the build to the target server. From automation testing perspective, we can use selenium grid running on K8s. Selenium-Chrome image can be used to start a container with chrome driver and chrome browser up and running. Or we can also run the tests on browserstack, Saucelabs etc. Deployment can be done using octopus deploy Once the deployment is done, we can send the HTTP POST request to the server to start the execution of tests

Explain Explicit vs Implicit timeouts

Explain Mobile Automation

Mobile traffic is more than the desktop traffic. Look at the stats - https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/worldwide We can use simulators or real devices for testing mobile apps. Main cloud players in automation testing are Browserstack, Saucelabs and Experitest. Main challenges in mobile automation are Biometrics - Face, fingerprint authentication (Solution is to use stubs) and Scanning of documents with live camera (Solution is to use stubs)

Cross browser testing

Explain in detail approach to do cross browser testing

API testing

You must know below stuff before appearing for an interview for an API tester role.

Rest - Representational State Transfer vs SOAP - Simple Object Access Protocol
WADL (REST)
WSDL - Web service description language vs UDDI - Universal description, discovery and integration
Various Content Types - e.g. application/json
Authentication mechanisms - Basic, Bearer
HTTP Protocol - HTTP
tools - Swagger/Open API, Jmeter, Postman, newman, Readyapi
Unit testing and API Frameworks - Mocha, Chai, RestAssured, RestSharp
Synchronous tests vs Asynchronus tests
Restful Constraints - Uniform interface , Layered System - proxy can be added, Cacheability, Client server architecture, Statelessness
How to intercept the request

Here is the sample example using mocha, chai and chai-http.

1let chai = require('chai')
2        let chaiHttp = require('chai-http')
3        chai.use(chaiHttp)
4        
5        describe('Suite', () => {
6        
7            it('T1', async () => {
8                let response = await chai.request("http://localhost:3000/api/hello")
9                .get("/");
10                chai.expect(response).to.have.status(200)
11            })
12        
13            it('T2', async () => {
14                let response = await chai.request("http://localhost:3000/api/contact")
15                    .post("/")
16                    .set("Content-Type", "application/json")
17                    .send({ "name": "n1", "email": "[email protected]", "phone": "0400000", "message": "M1" })
18                chai.expect(response).to.have.status(200)
19            })
20        
21            it('T3', async () => {
22                let response = await chai.request("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users")
23                    .get("/1")
24                    .set("Content-Type", "application/json")
25                chai.expect(response).to.have.status(200)
26        
27                //body
28                chai.expect(response.body.id).to.be.equals(1)
29        
30                //headers
31                chai.expect(response).to.have.header('Content-Type', 'application/json; charset=utf-8');
32                
33                //extract header value
34                console.log('log -> ', response.header['content-type']);
35                
36        
37            })
38        
39        })
40

Then run the tests using below command. Note that mocha has a default timeout of 2 seconds. npx mocha --timeout 10000 .jsonchai-apitest.js

Coding problems

Setup simple automation framework

You can choose any language and IDE of your choice and setup automation framework. e.g. Using JUnit and Selenium, you can create a simple framework to create tests and run them in IntelliJ IDEA.

Automate given website

You can choose any language and IDE of your choice and write a code to automate website. It is important to develop the code that works - launches browser and performs automated tasks.

Testing Concepts

Give example of low severity and high priority defect?

Logo is not looking good.

Write test scenarios for uploading image?

Some scenarios can be

User should be able to upload image successfully
If user tries to upload invalid file, error should be displayed
If user tries to upload a file which is exceeding the limit, error should be displayed
If user tries to upload a file that does not meet specifications like dimensions or quality, error should be displayed

Software development models

Waterfall
Iterative
Spiral
V Shaped
Agile - Minimum viable product

what is scrum?

Scrum is an agile style software development framework. Scrum has timebox iterations. Sprints are of 2-3 weeks long. Daily sprint meetings (Daily Scrums) occur (typically followed by Amigos or Huddle) and You need to Retros happen at the end of each sprint. In scrum, there are mainly 3 roles.

Product (Business) owners
Scrum master
Development team

Roles of scrum master is to manage the sprint process and not people (unlike project manager). Scrum framework involves sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint review and retros.

Sprint board vs Kanban board

Kanban board is used for maintainance type of project where the work is not planned. Kanban is a lean method. Sprint board is used for greenfield projects.

Difference between scrum and sprint

Scrum is made up of multiple sprints. A sprint duration is normally 2 weeks.

Testing level or phases

Unit testing
Component
Integration
System
UAT (Acceptance testing)
Alpha beta testing

Testing approaches?

Static
Dynamic
blackbox
whitebox
grey box
regression
Smoke test (Build verification test. Generally done before build is given to testing team)
Sanity testing (quick tests of critical features and advantage is that we get quick feedback)

Explain Test techniques

Test techniques include Compatibility testing, Exploratory Testing, State Transition Testing, Boundary Value Analysis, Equivalence Partitioning, Usability, Accessibility, Security testing, Performance testing

Explain Defect lifecycle

new, assigned, open, fixed, restest, closed

Explain spotify model

Spotify tribe model - structuring the organization to scale agility. tribe trio form the alliance tribe lead product lead design lead A tribe can have multiple squads - chapter is a team formed with members from different squad in same tribe. An org can have multiple tribes - guild is a team formed with members from different tribes in same organization.

Explain Test Plan

Test Plan contains below items.

Scope
- Describe what will be and will not be tested
  - In Scope
    - Below features will be tested
  - Out of Scope
    - Below features will not be tested
Test Levels and Environments
- Integration testing (Sanity and Regression)
- UAT testing
Browsers and Platforms
- Describe the browsers and platforms that will be tested.
  - Desktop Browsers
    - Chrome
    - Firefox
    - IE11
    - Edge
    - Safari
  - Mobile Browsers
    - Safari on iPhone (iOS)
    - Chrome on Android (Android)
Tech Stack and Tools
- Language
  - C#.Net
  - Java
  - JS
  - Python
- Library
  - Selenium
  - Appium
- Frameworks
  - NUnit
  - JUnit
  - Specflow
  - Cucumber
- Tools and Services
  - Postman
  - Fiddler
  - Jmeter
  - Browserstack
Risks
Environments
Testing deliverables

Test plan
requirement traceability matrix
Bug reports
Test metrices - pass %, Coverage
Test summary report

IEEE 829 test plan includes items like resources, budget and timelines, objective, scope, Process, tools to be used, Test plan identifier, Introduction, Test items, Features to be tested, Features not to be tested, Approach, Item pass/fail criteria, Suspension criteria and resumption requirements, Test deliverables, Testing tasks (test priorities, test execution and generating reports), requirement traceability matrix, ROI, Environmental needs, Responsibilities, Staffing and training needs, Schedule, Risks and contingencies, Approvals

Types of testing

Functional - Testing done to validate that major features of software are working.
Non-functional - Load testing, Compatibility testing, Localization testing and Internationalization testing, Scalability testing, Security testing, Recovery testing

Test plan vs Test strategy

Test strategy is a very high level document as compared to Test Plan. Test plan is created seperately for each project but test strategy may be created at organization level.

Domain Knowledge

Superannuation

USI - Unique Superannuation Identifier - USI replaces SPIN
SPIN - Superannuation Product Identification number
SFN - Superannuation Fund Numbe

Fund Types

Corporate funds - setup by big companies for own employees
Industry fund
public sector fund
Retail funds sold by banks
SMSF - self managed super funds

When customer joins the super fund, they are given membership certificate and employer contribution certificate ATO (Australian Taxation Office) keeps track of your super accounts. It is mandatory for all super funds to report the super account details of all members with ATO Member can view super account transactions and annual statements Members can make addition super contribution that can be withdrawn when purchasing first home Withdrawals Income accounts (Pension account) - Recieve regular income after retirement Rollin - Transfer in the super Rollout - Transfer out the super Employer contributions (Super Guarantee) - Employers must contribue 10% (may change) of annual salary of employee towards super Super account has some fees associated with it fund's performance is usually measured in CAGR A person can have multiple super accounts. But multiple accounts mean more fees It is advised to consolidate multiple accounts to save on fees Super funds typically have three types of insurance for members:

life (also known as death cover)
total and permanent disability (TPD)
income protection

Generally it is not possible to withdraw from super unless person is going through hardships or pandemic like covid hits Super fund can various investment options.

growth
balanced
conservative
cash
ethical
MySuper

Regulatory bodies

APRA - Australian Prudential Regulation Authority
ASIC - Australian Securities and investments Commission
SCT - Super Complaints Tribunal
AFCA - Australian Financial Complaints Authority
ATO - Australian Taxation Office

Insurance

Car
Medical Insurance
Travel
Life
Home and Contents
Income protection

Banking

Savings account
Term deposit account
Current account - everyday account
Home loan account
Personal loan account
Credit Cards
Debit Cards

SQL

When to use self join

Let us say we have employee table with columns - employee id and manager id. Then we can use self joins to get all employees whose manager is ?

Get the nth largest salary

You can use below query to get nth largest salary.

1SELECT * FROM employee 
2WHERE salary= (SELECT DISTINCT(salary) 
3FROM employee ORDER BY salary LIMIT n-1,1);