A successful interview, often means, we get to take a higher step in the career ladder. STH has published many interview articles on various testing specializations so far.

The last article in this genre that received tremendous response is Real Software Testing interview questions and answers.

This is going to be a follow-up article to it because we value our readership and their questions. Their wish is our command. :)

Here we go with the answers to the reader-submitted questions:

Q #1) What is the Testing process you follow in your project?

Answer: Since all projects are not the same and all of them do not follow a similar methodology, it is difficult to provide a generic answer to this question. The best way to handle these questions is to take a minute to understand the current project/role you are working on and come up with an answer that best reflects your situation.

If you are looking for a sample reference about the testing processes followed, you might want to check out:

Q #2) How to handle a situation when you don’t have time for complete testing?

Answer: When we do not have enough time to test, you might want to perform a Risk Analysis and determine which modules/areas of your AUT are prone to the highest risk and are critical to the success of the product and handle them first. Going the exploratory route instead of documenting the test cases is another way, but it is risky for sure. Check this article for more info.

Q #3) What is the Best Moment in Your Testing Life?

Answer: Personal experience based question – an answer that best captures your moment of professional pride as a tester can be given.

This could be when a product you tested is successfully live and you have a few of your friends and family using it or it could be when you found a critical issue and received appreciation or it could be when you signed off on your first project as a QA Manager etc.

However, if you do not have that one moment, saying that you are generally content as a Tester and that you do not have one incident to mark it all – that is perfectly ok too.

On a lighter note: If you are somewhat of a tease, you can say that – you found a defect which made your least favorite developer work all night on fixing- and that made you smile in satisfaction. Just kidding! :)

Q #4) Do you remember your Manager appreciate you for your work? Tell me any short incident.

Answer: Personal experience based question- the basic intention to questions like this is to judge how you are as a team player. “My manager never appreciated me for anything” is definitely not a good answer to this question. It shows that you are cynical and that positive feedback does not motivate you.

Instead, try to recollect any positive remarks that you received from your superior- even if it is a simple “Good job” or “Thanks” in return for a certain job done.

Q #5) How you performed as a troubleshooter in your last job? Any event you remember?

Answer: Personal experience based question – A real value add to testers is when we do not just report bugs but when we do some root cause analysis. This question is to see if you were ready to go that extra mile to perform what is beyond your job description.

Q #6) Which is the Best Module you ever tested, and why is it the best?

Answer: Personal experience based question – Now, ‘best’ differs with respect to everyone. If this question was asked to me -there was this one product (an add-in to Microsoft PowerPoint that generated custom reports for the client) that was built a long time ago and was shelved. The client finally wanted to use it and have it tested before using it.

There was no documentation, limited budget, limited time, no dev team or BAs (to get KT from, since the teams dissolved a long time ago) and the SLA was that the final product cannot have more than 3- medium severity bugs. We tested that product and successfully delivered it in less than 30 days.

Even today, I know some features in PPT that most of the others don’t. I see it as a personal success and loved the experience. But, if you consider all projects educative, exciting and learn from every experience in a similar fashion- that is ok to say too.

Q #7) Have you helped you/r Team in Risk Management? How, any example?

Answer: Personal experience based question- Say yes if you have or no if you haven’t. However, when you say No, make sure that you say that you never had a chance to do it, but explain what you know about Risk Management.

Try this article for more information on this: Risk management using FMEA

Q #8) Tell me which one the Most Critical Bug you find in your life? What was the Severity? How it influenced the AUT?

Answer: If you haven’t guessed it already, this question is to assess how well you understand the criticality and severity parameters for an issue. You might want to again cite examples from your experience. Usually, critical issues are the ones that might block the testing or cause data leaks or security breaches, etc.

Q #9) Which is the best workaround you suggested that solved a big problem – following which you and your team had some time to relax (no delay to the release date)? Did it happen any time? If yes can you share it with me?

Answer: This question, in my opinion, sounds a little conspiring and a conspiracy is never good news. So refrain from answering this question entirely.

You can say that you have helped in solving issues whenever you can and in whatever capacity you could (if you have a specific example, go ahead and give it) but when you were done earlier than needed, you communicated the same and picked up few other pending tasks to utilize the excess time you have. Questions like that are to test your integrity and professional commitment.

Q #10) How to handle the low-frequency issues during your testing?

Answer: By low frequency, I hope you mean the issues that cannot be reproduced consistently over time. If an issue is not coming up every time we repeat the same sequence of steps, we do some digging around to see if we can find any evidence to the occurrence of the bug(logs or failure messages) and if nothing else works, we report it all the same.

As testers, we cannot leave anything without reporting.

Q #11) How to coach a newer beginning in testing scope?

Answer: This question is to assess your leadership skills. The best way is to provide the newcomers with all documentation, necessary accesses, arrange hands-on KT sessions, introduce them to the point of contact to all the components of the projects, give them small tasks to test their understanding and to eventually ease their way into the testing project.

Q #12) How to improve skills designing test cases and make sure a high coverage rate?

Answer: Test designing is successful when the requirements are analyzed and understood completely. To ensure 100% test coverage is achieved, you should not miss out on creating test cases for any requirements and from time to time we can check ourselves with the help of a Traceability matrix.

Q #13) The following is an issue found when exploring an application- There are no limits to any of the fields in the create account page- What does this mean?

Answer: This could mean two things, one- it is a bug. Two- it might allow you to enter as many characters as you like, but might perform the validation when submitting the page.

Q #14) If you found that login does not have the missing “Forgot password” option- while Exploratory testing, how would you report it?

Answer: A bug is a bug, no matter how you find it. Reporting this issue is not going to be any different than reporting one that you found via a test case. Check out this article on how to report issues.

That’s it! That’s all we got.

See Also => 101+ Software Testing Interview Questions and Answers

In conclusion, we thank all the readers for submitting such useful questions that will benefit all our readers.

Do you all have anything else to add or would you answer any of these questions differently? Please let us know in the comments.