Top 15 Software Testing Interview Question and Answers

Description of Software Testing Interview Questions

Acing an interview and impressing the recruiter is crucial to land a well-paying job offer, irrespective of your experience as a software tester. The software testing interview questions for experienced candidates and freshers are categorized into skill-based, domain-based, and scenario-based to help you stand out from the competition.     

Introduction

Skilled testers are a valuable part of every development team and are crucial to the project's success. Apart from the knowledge of various testing tools, you will need to demonstrate your analytical skills, communication skills, and willingness to learn during your interview. These software testing interview questions and answers will help you do just that.       

Overview

Software testing jobs are well-paying, secure, and offer a significant level of job satisfaction. The role of QA Analyst was termed the second happiest job in the world. The average salary for a software tester is INR 3,35,000 per annum, and it can increase as you gain more work experience and move up the corporate ladder. 

All that stands between you and the job is the interview. These software testing interview questions are a good way to prepare for the interview. 

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Software Testing Interview Questions and Answers

The software testing questions try to gauge if you are the right fit for the job depending on your knowledge of the domain, your skills, and how you respond in various scenarios. 

Domain-Based Software Testing Interview Questions

Domain-based software testing interview questions try to understand how much you know about the various terms and tools used by the testers. 

1) Explain the role of testing in the software development lifecycle and the software testing life cycle. 

The role of software testing in the development lifecycle will vary depending on the methodology used for development.

In the Waterfall methodology, the testing stage is one of the final stages that precede the product release and maintenance. Once the developers finish the project implementation, the testers ensure that the final product meets the requirements.

In the Agile methodology, each increment is tested, and the feedback is used in future developments. It is an iterative process where development and testing take place side by side.

The software testing lifecycle has the following stages.

• Requirement Analysis: Start by understanding exactly what is expected of the software and how it is supposed to work.  
• Planning the Test: Plan the testing activities. Determine the scope of the test, the time and effort to be allocated, the tools or platform for the testing, and documenting the tests.  
• Preparing the Test Environment: Set up a test environment that best resembles the real environment where it will be deployed.
• Generating Test Cases: Generate various test cases that can potentially expose bugs or defects.
• Executing the Test: Run the test cases.
• Test Closure: If the test exposed a bug or a defect, then report the same and close the test. Close the test if the software passes it without any bugs.

2) How will you categorize the different types of testing? 

The tests can be broadly classified as functional and non-functional testing.

Functional testing is used to test if the software works as expected. It is a form of black-box testing where you verify if the software works according to the requirements. Unit testing, integration testing, system testing, interface testing, regression testing, and user acceptance testing fall under functional testing.

Non-functional testing tests the attributes of the product, such as its performance, scalability, reliability, etc. It is used to ensure that the system can deliver various performance metrics specified by the client. Documentation testing, security testing, reliability testing, installation testing, and performance testing come under non-functional testing. 

3) What is the difference between manual testing and automated testing?

4) Explain the bug or defect life cycle.

The cycle starts with the discovery of the bug. The bug is then assigned to a developer. The developer can reject the bug if it is not valid. If it is a valid bug, the developer will fix the bug and send it for testing.

If the code passes the test, it will need to be verified once again, and the bug is closed. However, if the code fails the test, it goes back into the Active state where the developer is trying to fix it.   

5) What is the difference between integration testing and system testing? 

Skill-Based Software Testing Interview Questions

The skill-based software testing interview questions and answers are designed to test if you have good analytical, communication, and time management skills in addition to strong technical skills.

6) How will you classify the bugs based on their severity?

Bugs can belong to any of the three categories.  

• Low: User interface issues and accessibility issues are assigned a low severity.
• Medium: Bugs where the users are unable to perform certain actions, software hangs, leaky abstractions, failure of boundary conditions are classified as medium severity.  
• High: Bugs that can crash the system or cause security issues are classified as high severity. Any kind of business logic or calculation errors, loss of data or exposing sensitive data, the system crashing under high load, the system crashing when the user takes certain actions, and security problems come under this category.  

7) What are the best practices one should follow while writing test cases? 

Here are some of the best practices you should follow while writing test cases.

• You should always try to follow the 80/20 rule. The rule is that 20% of your tests should cover 80% of the application.
• Always think from the perspective of an end-user while writing the test case.
• Make sure that you provide proper descriptions for the test cases. The description should include the test tools, data, and the details of the environment.
• Always follow the proper naming conventions while naming the test cases. It makes it easier for the stakeholders to trace the test to the requirements.
• Make it a point to check your test cases for redundancies regularly.
• You should always specify the assumptions made while testing.
• The test cases should be detailed enough that anyone can run them.
• As far as possible, ensure that the test cases are independent. If there are any interdependencies between test cases, then clearly point them out.
• All test cases must be assigned a priority.   

8) What is Boundary Value Analysis? Why is it important?  

Boundary Value Analysis or BVA is a testing technique where you test the system's behaviour at the boundary conditions. There is a higher chance of a defect near the boundary in most cases rather than within the specified range.

When the values are included in the specified range, the testing can also be called positive testing. When the values lie outside the range, the testing is called negative testing.

9) What are the different HTTP status codes that a server can return?

The response codes are three-digit numbers varying from 100 to 599.

• 100 to 199: These are temporary responses.
• 200 to 299: These codes indicate that the request was successfully carried out by the server.
• 300 to 399: These are redirect codes. They indicate the actions that the client should take to satisfy the HTTP request.
• 400 to 499: These codes indicate an error with the client that initiated the HTTP request.
• 500 to 599: These codes indicate a problem on the server's side while processing the request.

10) Which test case should you write first? Black box or white box?

You should write the black-box test cases first, as you do not need intimate knowledge of the system architecture to write these test cases. A deeper knowledge of the product and its architecture is required for writing the white box test cases.

The information needed for writing the white box test cases is not usually available at the start of the project. In contrast, the information for writing the black-box test cases is readily available from the start.

Scenario-Based Software Testing Interview Questions

The scenario-based software testing interview questions present some of the common challenging scenarios that a software tester will face. These software testing questions are designed to help the recruiter understand how you will react to these scenarios.

11) You have to test an application whose requirements have not been frozen. How will you perform this test?

Ideally, the requirements should be frozen before the development and the testing take place. But sadly, this is not the case in the real world. In such cases, here is what you can do.

• Try to make the test cases as flexible as you can.
• Try to come up with a higher-level plan for testing and avoid getting into the minute details.
• Try to understand which features or functionalities are an absolute must and least likely to change. Proceed with testing them in detail while the other functionalities are finalized.
• The test team can also become a part of the requirement gathering meetings to better understand the requirements that are less likely to be changed.

12) Is it possible to perform exhaustive testing? Why? How will you know when to stop testing?

It is impossible to perform exhaustive testing. You will have to test all the values that every input can take. It will be extremely resource-heavy and time-consuming. Creating test cases where you are more likely to find errors is the better strategy.

With complex systems with too many interdependencies, you might find it hard to determine when to stop testing. In such cases, you must stop testing when a certain percentage of the test cases result in a pass or when you have reached a particular level of code coverage, or if the bug rate falls below a certain level.

Deadlines and test budgets are other factors that can impact the decision of stopping testing.  

13) You have to test a website. What are the different scenarios you will use? 

Here are a few scenarios to consider while testing websites.

• Check if all the page links and hyperlinks redirect to where they are intended to redirect.
• Test all forms with valid as well as invalid data. Also, try leaving the fields empty and test with existing records.
• Test the functionality of the website as per the requirements.
• Ensure the all the GUI elements are consistent with the design elements of the page.
• Test the website under heavy load to understand the server response time.
• Test the website on various browsers and OS. 

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14) You have to choose between automation testing and manual testing. How will you decide?

You should use automated testing in the following scenarios:

• Tests that should be executed periodically
• Tests have repetitive steps.
• Less time to complete the tests.
• Tests that need reports to be generated after every run.
• Tests that run in a standard environment.    

Manual testing is the best choice for usability testing, ad-hoc, and exploratory testing.

15) Why can't the developers test the code themselves? Why is the role of software tester important? 

When the developer tests the code, they are more likely to only run tests where the code passes. The optimism and personal connection with the code prevent the developer from creating test cases and will truly test the system's limits and cause it to break. A software tester is experienced in writing test cases that are designed to break the system. 

Conclusion

With this, we wrap up the most important software testing interview questions you're likely to face during an interview. The answers give you all the information you need to land the job. Good luck!