Interview Questions

Question 1

Tell me about yourself?

Answer 1

I’m Sharmin and for the last 3 years, I’ve been working as a QA engineer at an American Health Care company called Humana. During my time there, I worked in the Vision department and my projects focused on testing the user interface for the web application. We worked in a scrum environment and completed two-week sprints so I’ve become familiar with all types of meetings, working with my BAs and POs, and just working with a team efficiently. I was lucky enough to work with such a fluid team where I was able to wear many hats throughout my time there. And now I’m looking into a more senior role where I can better utilize my versatile skills and I can see myself doing that in this role with your company.

Question 2

Tell me about your most recent project?

Answer 2

As I mentioned I work in the Vision department and my projects focused on the user interface for the web application. In the application, there are many modules, and recently my team and I have been working on the language translation module. I collaborated with my team to ensure that the user would have a seamless transition from English to a different language easily. I was involved in writing test cases and designing test scripts for which we used Jira, we executed the test scripts using Selenium and while testing, we found bugs. For reporting bugs, we used Jira as well.

Question 3

How did you get into the QA Career? What made you want to become a QA?

Answer 3

While studying ComSci in school I still remember how after weeks of coding we started doing testing and my professor talked about the side of tech that is QA and all that QA testers do. Testing my own code and my peer’s code was something new and I felt that it fit me well. I have always loved solving puzzles and analytical problems. And so with the tech industry booming, my interest and inclination towards it just grew. I loved the idea of being part of a system that is designed to make software run as smoothly as possible.

Question 4

What kind of environment did you work in?

Answer 4

I work in an agile scrum environment where we work in two-week sprints. I work with my PO, Scrum Master, and Scrum Team to complete the sprints while attending various meetings like the daily stand-up, sprint planning, sprint retrospective, and more.

Question 5

How many team members did you have on your team? Did you have any offshore team?

Answer 5

My team consists of 5 team members, our Product Owner, Scrum Master, two Developers, and me, the one QA. We did not have an offshore team.

Question 6

Why was your role important?

Answer 6

The role of a QA is extremely important as we are responsible for the delivery of a bug-free product and making sure the software runs as expected. As a QA tester, I am responsible for making sure the software is doing what it’s supposed to so we can prevent incidents involving things like the loss of money, time, and reputation.

Question 7

How did you add value to your team?

Answer 7

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Question 8

What made you a good QA?

Answer 8

good question

Question 9

Explain to me what SDLC is?

Answer 9

SDLC of the Software Development Life Cycle is the entire process taken to build or develop software, from its initial conception to its release. It usually consists of five to six phases, that go from the Initial Phase to Analysis to Design to coding to testing, and finally to delivery and maintenance.

Question 10

How do you build software using the agile methodology?

Answer 10

The agile methodology is an iterative approach to software development. All the phases of the SDLC are run through with a cyclic iteration to develop the software system incrementally.

Question 11

What are the best practices for reporting a bug?

Answer 11

It’s important to make sure you are reproducing the bug at least two times and perhaps asking a peer if can before writing the bug report. Make sure you are testing the same bug across modules, systems, data, or environments. Report immediately and write a good bug summary where you are using diplomatic language and properly defining severity and priority.

Question 12

What tools are you familiar with? What did you use and for what purposes?

Answer 12

I’m familiar with using Jira, IntelliJ and Post Man. We used Jira for project management and more specifically reporting bugs. IntelliJ with Selenium for writing tests in Java and testing our software using Selenium web driver. And PostMan to create, share, test and document APIs.

Question 13

What method is used to estimate sprint story points?

Answer 13

The team will take an item from the backlog, discuss it briefly, and each member will mentally formulate an estimate using the Fibonacci number (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…).

Question 14

How many stories does your team complete per sprint?

Answer 14

Anywhere from 5 to 15.

Question 15

What are the scrum ceremonies and what was your involvement?

Answer 15

Theres the sprint planning, backlog grooming session/refinement, daily scrum, sprint review, and sprint retrospective. For the sprint planning, I estimated and committed to the features with my team. For the backlog grooming session, I made sure the user stories were all well documented and I was clear on the requirements. for the daily scrum, I talked about the progress made, what I’m going to do, and if I have any issues. and for the sprint retrospective, we discussed the good and bad of the sprint.

Question 16

Can you give me an example of what you contributed to during the scrum ceremonies?

Answer 16

Yes, for example during a daily scrum, I would state, “Yesterday I worked testing User stories 3 and 4 and started on 5. Today I’m going to be working on 5 and 6. I had a bit of difficulty with the site’s clickability at one point so I’ll have to see if that persists.”

Question 17

Where do you see yourself in the next 3 to 5 years?

Answer 17

As I’ve been in the field for a few years already my ultimate goal in about 3 to 5 years is to master my position and advance into a managerial role within my department. Over the next few years, I see myself taking on new and exciting projects within your company that will prepare me for a management role. I’m also excited to learn new methods and technologies, the tech industry is always growing so I wish to pursue new skills. I am excited about the opportunities this job would provide me, as I believe they will support my long-term career goals and allow me to grow within your company and give back by utilizing the skills I’ll gain.

Question 18

How often do you perform smoke testing?

Answer 18

Smoke testing is done after every major build as it tests the most important functionalities for each module. We can make sure the build is ready to be tested further.

Question 19

What was your role during UAT?

Answer 19

If needed at times, QAs would also perform UAT and help test the software in the final steps of the project.

Question 20

What do you do when you find an issue that is a show-stopper?

Answer 20

I would follow the steps of reporting a bug per usual but I would make sure to emphasize the priority and severity of the bug, this particular bug having a high priority and high severity. Showstoppers follow their name as in they stop the show and unless the bug is solved the process cannot go on. So the development team is notified immediately so it can be resolved at the earliest opportunity.

Question 21

Why was your project important in the company?

Answer 21

As all my projects were closely involved with user interface it was extremely important to constantly be able to meet user requirements and support the effective functionality of our site.

Question 22

How do we select what is to be automated? Automation Candidate Selection? Explain

Answer 22

Generally the more repetitive the test, the better it is for automation. Some other automation candidates to look for include; if it will save time, if the test is subject to human error, if the test is time-consuming, tests that are run across platforms, etc.

Question 23

What is Java?

Answer 23

Java is a class-based, object-oriented programming language.

Question 24

What is a class in Java?

Answer 24

A class in Java is a user-defined blueprint for creating objects.

Question 25

What is a method in Java? Give example

Answer 25

Methods in Java are known as functions and are used to perform certain actions.

Ex: public static void main(String[] args){}

Question 26

What is the difference between the void and return method? Show one example of reusable method either void or return.

Answer 26

The void method type means this method doesn’t have a return type. It will not return a response when run. While the return method type returns the value that is declared.

Ex: public static String example(){String example = “”; return example;}

Question 27

What is an array? Give an example.

Answer 27

Arrays are used to store multiple values in a single variable, instead of declaring separate variables for each value.

Ex: ArrayList<String> example = new ArrayList<>();
int[] example = new int[i];</String>

Question 28

What is a loop? Show syntax

Answer 28

Loops are features that enables the execution of a set of instructions/functions repeatedly.

Ex: for (int 1 = 0; example.size(); i++){…)
while (i < example.size()){i++;}

Question 29

What is a conditional statement? Show the syntax

Answer 29

Conditional statements define the conditions that are true or false and then execute based on where or not the condition is true.

Ex: if(example >= 90 && example <= 100){…}

Question 30

What is a split? Show a brief example

Answer 30

The Java split function is used to split a sting into a string array based on the regular expression or the given delimiter.

Ex: String [] splitMessageArray = splitMessage.split(“ “);

Question 31

What is method overload?

Answer 31

Method overloading is a feature that allows a class to have more than one method with the same name, if their argument lists are different.

Question 32

What is exception in Java?

Answer 32

An exception is an event, which occurs during the execution of a program, that disrupts the flow of the programs instructions. When an error occurs within a method, the method creates an object and hands it off to the runtime system.

Question 33

How many ways can we catch exceptions?

Answer 33

We can use the try-catch, try-catch-finally, and the throws exceptions

Question 34

How do I launch the browser using WebDriver?

Answer 34

WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();

Question 35

What is the difference between the absolute & relative xpath?

Answer 35

The relative xpath is the unique one, where we find a specific unique property of an element using the two forward slashes. The absolute xpath looks for an element by going from tag to tag, its locating property from the root, from parent to child tag looking for the element.

Question 36

What is the different between “/” and “//” in xpath?

Answer 36

Single slash is used to create absolute xpath, whereas double slash is used to create relative xpath.

Question 37

What is xpath contains?

Answer 37

The contains() function within xpath expression is used to search for the web elements that contain a particular text.

ex: xpath = //tagname[contains(@Attribute, ‘Value”)]

Question 38

Lets say I have a button which has a property value of title=myButton. Use xpath syntax to locate this element and click on it.

Answer 38

…(By.xpath(“*//[@title=’myButton’]”).click();

Question 39

What is the difference between quit() vs close()?

Answer 39

quit() method quits the driver and closes every window associated and opened by the driver, the close() method closes the current window.

Question 40

What is ChromeOptions?

Answer 40

ChromeOptions help customize and interact with the chrome driver sessions.

Question 41

Show syntax of how to capture a text from a webpage.

Answer 41

String text = driver.findElement(…).getText();

Question 42

Show syntax of how to enter a string into a input/text field.

Answer 42

WebElement field = driver.findElement(…);
feild.sendKeys(“Input text”);

Question 43

What is the difference between findElement vs findElements?

Answer 43

findElement finds the first listed specific element, while findElements finds the specific element by retrieving them using a specified index.

Question 44

How many ways can I select an element from a drop down using select command?

Answer 44

There are two ways to select, using selecyByVisibleText or by using xpath, value, get options.

Question 45

How can i store a location into a variable? Show syntax.

Answer 45

WebElement abc = driver.findElement(By.xpath(“//*[]”));

Question 46

What is an array list? Give one example using Array list

Answer 46

An ArrayList is a resizable array.

Ex: ArrayList<Sting> example = new ArrayList<>;</Sting>

Question 47

How do we switch between tabs? Just tell me the command for it

Answer 47

ArrayList<String> tabs = new ArrayList<>(driver.getWindowHandles());
driver.switchTo().window(tabs.get(1));</String>

Question 48

What is implicit v explicit wait? Show syntax

Answer 48

An explicit wait makes the WebDriver wait for a certain condition to occur before proceeding further with execution. An implicit wait makes the WebDriver poll for DOM for a certain amount of time when trying to locate an element.

Ex: driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);

// explicit wait - to wait for the compose button to be click-able
WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver,30);
wait.until(ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.xpath(“///*[]”)));

Question 49

How can I hover over an element?

Answer 49

//declare and define mouse actions
Actions mouseActions = new Actions(driver);
//hover to item
WebElement hover = driver.findElement(By.xpath(“//*[]”));
mouseActions.moveToElement(hover).perform();

Question 50

How can I click or type in a textbox using mouse movement? Explain

Answer 50

//declare and define mouse actions
Actions mouseActions = new Actions(driver);
//hover to item
WebElement hover = driver.findElement(By.xpath(“//*[]”));
mouseActions.moveToElement(hover).click().perform();

Question 51

What are the annotations you have used in testNG? Also, briefly explain what is the purpose of each

Answer 51

I’ve used @BeforeSuite, for setting up the driver, @Test to run each test and set priorities if needed and @AfterSuite to close the driver.

Question 52

How can I tell testNG to run @Test methods in sequence? Bascially how do I set the priority for @Test annotation in testing

Answer 52

@Test(priority = 1)

Question 53

What is the purpose of creating a project in Maven?

Answer 53

Maven helps the developer to create a Java-based project more easily. Accessibility of a new feature or added in Maven can be easily added to a project in Maven configuration. It increases the performance of the project and building process. The main feature of Maven is that it can download the project dependency libraries automatically.

Question 54

How can we execute test cases using testNg? Show an example including the annotation

Answer 54

• Create a folder and name it test
• create a java class to be tested in the folder
• create test case class
• create testng.xml

Question 55

Show the expression of how to define the following properties in xpath if I want to use more than one property to identify an element. Href=“abcd123”, value=“myPayment”

Answer 55

name_of_element = [@href = ‘abcd123’ AND @value = ‘myPayment’]

name_of_element = [@href = ‘abcd123’ OR @value = ‘myPayment’]

Question 56

If I want to verify a page title from a webpage which command can I use?

Answer 56

//capture the title of the age and compare it with your expected title ‘GOOGLE’
String actualTitle = driver.getTitle();
if (actualTitle.equals(“GOOGLE”)){
System.out.println(“My title matches”);
} else {
System.out.println(“Title doesn’t match. Actual title is “ +actualTitle);
}

Question 57

What is the difference between soft assert and hard assert? Show syntax for soft assert.

Answer 57

A Hard Assertion is a type of assertion that throws an exception immediately when an assert statement fails. Test steps after hard assertion will not be executed and the next test in the test suite will start.

Soft Assertions are the type of assertions that do not throw an exception immediately when an assertion fails. Therefore, all steps and soft assertions in the automated test will execute before failing the test.

SoftAssert softAssert = new SoftAssert();

softAssert.assertEquals(…);

softAssert.assertAll();

Question 58

Let’s say I have an element that has the property of class=“navgroup” but there are multiple elements with the same class name. I want to click on the second element within that group so show me the syntax of how can I locate the second element of that group

Answer 58

WebElement element = driver.findElements(By.xpath(“//*[@class= ‘navgroup’]”)).get(1);

WebElement element = driver.findElements(By.xpath(“//*[@class= ‘navgroup’]”)).get(1);