Top 35 QA Interview Questions And Answers

Looking for QA Interview Questions for your next interview preparation?

Here is the right place to learn all topics for interview preparation (Manual Testing interview Questions).

Let me tell you more about them.

Table of Contents

What is Quality Assurance?

QA stands for Quality Assurance. It is a procedure to defined a quality of a software products or services. Mainly it is focused on fulfilled of products requirements. It is increases the customer confidence and company credibility.

What are the processes cover in Quality Assurance?

It follows the PDCA Cycle:

QA Interview Questions Quality Assurance

Plan- In this phase, the organization defined the objectives and processes to achieve/deliver the high- quality end product.

Do- In this phase done all development and testing and do changes if required.

Check – In this phase, we monitor and modify the processes whether these processes meet the end-user requirement or not.

Act – In this phase, we can introduce the actions which required improving the processes.

What is Quality Control (QC)? This is the most important QA Interview Questions.

Quality Control is the part of software engineering to ensure the quality of the end product. It is the process of finding the defect and providing more suggestions to improve the quality of a product.

The main aim of QC to check whether the product meets the end user’s requirement or not. If not, then it needs to be fixed before delivery to the end-user.

Steps in Quality Control:

Explain which types of document used in Software Quality Assurance?

There are different types of documents used in this process.

Requirement Document

Test Matrics

Test Plan

Test Cases

Test Scenario

Traceability matrix

How does software testing improve quality?

Software testing does not improve quality directly. It only facilitates improvement.

It helps measure the quality.

It improves the quality as bugs are found and fixed.

The root cause analysis will drive defect prevention activities, improving the quality.

Define test plan and its contents?

Test Plan defines purpose, scope, approach, resources and responsibilities of testing activities.

Also In addition, it will also list items to be tested, testing task and risk associated with each item.

Tell me important sections of a test plan?

Below are the sections of a test plan

Test plan identifier

Introduction

Test scope and limitations

Test objectives

Assumptions

Risk analysis

Strategy

Feature to be tested/not tested

Roles and responsibilities

Test schedules and resources

Suspension/resumption criteria

Test environment

Communication Approach

Test tools

What is Testware?

Testware is the artifacts that are required to design and execute a test like test data, test cases, and test plans, etc.

Testers develop it for their testing purpose.

What is meant by a test case?

Test case is an input and output specifications and a statement of function under test.

What is a positive and negative test case?

Positive test case means –‘What should happen’. Test case which considers the input domain that yields acceptance of values to give correct output is a positive test case.

Example – The password field should accept minimum 6 characters.

Negative test case means – ‘What should not happen’. Test case which considers input domain which yields rejections of values is a negative test case.

Example – password field should not accept more than 6 characters.

What is a good test case?

A Good test case has following attributes

Accurate

Traceable to the requirements

Economical

Appropriate for test environment

Self-standing

State some common mistakes done during writing test cases?

Common mistake in test case writing are as follows:

Making cases too long or verbose

Incomplete and incorrect

Skipping a step

Unclear way of specifying actions

Failure to clean up

Name or fields used are not consistent with the current source code under test.

What is test scenario?

Test scenario is a high-level definition of test conditions from which one can write one or more test cases.

Test scenario example for login

Positive Scenario:

Ok button validation:

Enter correct name and password, click on OK button. You will login.

Negative scenario:

Enter wrongly in one of the fields will throw an error message.

What is bug leakage and bug release?

Bug leakage: When a defect is unfound by tester and which is found by end-user is called a bug leakage.

Bug release: When a particular version of the software is released with known bugs is called bug release.

Usually these bugs are low severity or low priority bugs. These bugs should mention in release notes.

What is bug triage?

Bug triage is the process of prioritized of bugs based on severity, priority and risk level. It reduced the cost of fixing of bugs if carried out by the right time.

There are some actions that needs to be taken during bug triage meeting:

  • Priority and Severity
  • Assigned to which developer
  • Reproducible of bugs on the current and previous build.
  • Log details information should present at defect level.

What is test log?

Test log keep track of execution history. Results of execution of test cases are recorded in test logs.

It contains the following –

Actual results, Defect ID for failed test cases.

Comments

Date

Tester name

Build/Release number

Date of release.

What are the different methods of white box testing?

In white-box testing, test cases are designed for

Statement coverage

Decision coverage

Condition and multiple condition coverage

Path coverage

Loop coverage

What is mutation testing?

In mutation testing, the source code of the original component is deliberately modified.

Then the valid test suite is run on this mutated code (called mutant).

By design, this mutated code should produce a different output (or confirm the defect). As this process of mutation is very exhaustive, generally, it is restricted to unit level.

What is the difference between black box and white box testing?

                      Black Box Testing                        White Box Testing
Tester doesn’t require knowledge of the internal structure of the code.Testershould know the internal structure of the code.
Infinite test casesFinite. Scope is limited by source code.
Performed by testers without knowledge of design and programmingPerformed by developers/ testers who know design as well as programming.
Main goal to test the behavior of the applicationMain goal to test internal operation of the system
It is taken limited timeIt is taken more time

What is the difference between regression testing and retesting?

In retesting, failed test cases are executed to ensure that the defect is really fixed.

In regression testing, all the passed test cases are executed on the related modules to verify that there is no injection of new defect due to changes in one of the modules.

Tricky QA Interview Questions

Explain the concept of hot fix.

A hot fix is a software patch applied to a live system i.e. in production. These are provided to address critical and specific issues quickly like plugging the security holes.

Caution has to exercise as it may have a risk of possible regressions.

How will you start testing any software?

Any software can be tested with following two approaches.

Based of use cases – one may pick up high priority use case and start test planning based on them.

Based on risks – Risk analysis is done for features of the product and entire test plan is evolved based on highest to lowest risk perceived for a feature.

What is recovery testing?

In this testing, a system is forced to fail in multiple ways and checked if it recovers to a consistent state either automatically or after following the recovery procedure. Typically a loss of resource is forced (like a device, server and running program) and verified if system recovers. This is especially critical in case of banking transactions.Transaction consists of multiple executable statements. If some device fails in the middle of the transaction, the transactions should roll back itself to the start of the transaction to maintain the consistent state of the data.

Objective of the testing is to check if mean time to recovery (MTTR) is met which would affect Service level agreement (SLA) when manual intervention in involved.

State the difference between verification and validation.[Imp. for QA Interview Questions]

Verification is the set of activities that confirm that the software in created in accordance with the specification.

Validation is the process or set of activities which ensure that software created is traceable or linked to user requirement.

After release, if client asks to add a new product module, what necessary testing will you do?

The testing approach would be as follows

  1. New module would be tested independently for unit and integration testing.
  2. New module’s integration interfaces would be tested for integration of new module with the older integrated system.
  3. All the related and dependent modules from older systems would undergo regression testing.

What qualities does QA engineer require?

Following are typical qualities a good QA engineer should have

Good communication

Decision-making skills

Negative thinking

Quick learner

Team Player

Good time management

What are the different environment through which project deployment is done till it goes live?

configuration management system

Software application deployment moves the software from development environment to the production environment in various steps.

Development Environment  

This is the day to day working environment used by software developers. Here, a predominantly integrated development environment (IDEs) is used. For example, Visual Studio, Eclipse IDE.

QA or Integrated environment

It is a common environment where all the individual artifacts are combined or integrated together for the purpose of testing. Focus is on validation of the entire project or applications behavior rather than individual components.

Staging environment

A sufficiently tested software application is deployed in an environment that is similar to the real environment in which application is going to be executed in the real world. This can help in alpha and beta testing before the application is released for production.

Production Environment

This is the actual environment where the application is deployed for usage in the real world. This environment is designed to cater to all non- functional requirements like scalability, availability and performance.

What is GA release?

General availability release is the next step in RTM if no critical defect is found. GA release is the supposed to be more stable, reliable and free of serious bugs. It is also known as production release.

 GA also includes activities under commercialization like creation of marketing collateral, making the media available thought various distribution mechanisms etc.

Scenario based software testing interview questions

Suppose in 1000 test cases you found 100 defects and developer fixed 50 of them and new build comes to you. How many test cases will you execute?

For retesting only 50 test cases would be executed.

For regression, only related test cases for the failed ones, to be re-executed.

You have 100 test cases to execute and you have time only to execute 40 test cases in four hours so which test cases will you execute from a set of 60 functional and 40 UI test cases?

The answer is prioritizing the test case. Here the question is open ended and one does not know if UI test cases would be important. Typically one would tend to ignore UI test cases but you need to be sure that skipping all UI test cases would not increase the risk.

Suppose you have release in 10 days and 650 test cases are to be executed. How will you perform testing to complete all test cases?

Put more resources depending upon the estimation of the effort. If all test cases must be executed, planning for complete 10 days may not be good idea since you may end up running more test cases for retesting or regression purpose.

Prioritize the test cases with the team lead and ensure that critical parts of the application are being fully tested. Here you may not be execute all the test cases.

Suppose some bugs are detected by the customer when application is in production phase. Developer has fixed that bug. Will you do compatibility testing for only a particular browser or for all the browsers?

If the bug under consideration is related to user interface then only compatibility testing is needed. In compatibility testing, the application should be tested on all the popular browsers and customer specified browsers also.

If any bug is reproducible at client side (in production environment) and not in the test environment what could be the issue.

Many times test environment is a miniature replica of production environment/client environment. This is a possibility due to difference in configuration of hardware and software itself. Reason is configuration mismatch.

Second possibility is due to version or release difference on the test environment and production environment and production environment. This can happen due to error on part of deployment or if a hot fix is applied only on the running application in production environment which was not applied to test environment.

Summary

Hope this Q&A tutorial was covered all important QA Interview Questions that will helpful to clear your QA Interviews.

In future I will add more real time interview questions and also will add QA automation interview questions.

If you have other questions or feedback, the comment section is yours. Don’t forget to leave a comment below!

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