Real Life & Framework Flashcards
- Tell me about the D2D activity?
D2D activities:
● Check emails
● Check Jenkins reports to get smoke or regression status. If there are any failures, I will need to rerun the smoke test and see if the actual environment is down or there is an issue with my script or if there is an actual bug.
● Check user stories status in Jira, bug status reports.
● Attend Daily Stand Up to discuss what I did yesterday, what I am going to do today and if there are any issues.
● Analyze user stories, create manual test cases and prepare test data if needed.
● Execute manual test cases, talk to developers, report any found bugs in JIRA
● Automate and execute test cases.
● Update Status in JIRA (Move stories from In Testing to Done)
● Framework enhancement
● Execute Regression before each project release (could every sprint or every other sprint)
Meetings:
➔ if it is the beginning of the sprint after Daily Stand Up you are attending Sprint Planning
➔ in the middle of Sprint you will have a Sprint Grooming session for upcoming sprints or any future sprints.
➔ if it the end of the sprint you will attend Sprint Demo and then Sprint Retro
➔ we have weekly meetings (on Mondays or can be on Fridays) with the entire QA team (QA Manager Test Leads and all testers from different projects that work in the company)
➔ code review (once during the sprint)- meetings where you will review each other’s code, learn and improve and make sure everyone follows framework structure and coding standards.
➔ Ensure that all test related work is carried out as per the defined standards and procedures.
What is your role as a QA Automation Engineer?
Roles and Responsibilities:
● As a QA Automation Engineer my responsibilities are to Design, Develop and Maintain Test Automation Framework for the application I am supporting.
● Understand requirements/user stories and create Test Cases based on the acceptance criteria.
● Automate and execute Regression and Smoke test cases.
● Maintain and execute automated smoke tests every morning to verify stability of the environment.
● Actively participate in all agile scrum meetings and provide feedback to the team.
● Find bugs and report it in JIRA for the development team to fix it.
● Analyze the changes in the new build and update it accordingly.
● Attend any urgent troubleshooting triage or meetings
● Help Team members in understanding any requirements whenever needed
- Tell me about your team and your scrum structure
Every company is unique and will have a different number of team members.
Below are just examples from one of the projects.
We are totally 6/9 or more members within the team:
Scrum Team 1 Product Owner 1 Scrum Master 5 Developers: 2 full stack and 3 frontend 2 Automation Engineers including me
The rest of the team 2 Business Analyst 2 UI UX 1 Architect 1 PM
Our sprints are ___ weeks long and starts on _____
We have our sprint ceremonies that held on different days during the week:
● Sprint Planning - first day of the sprint at 10 AM (can last 2-4 hours depend on the team size and how long is the sprint)
● Daily Stand Up - everyday at 10:15 AM
● Sprint Demo/Review - last day of the Sprint at 11 AM (usually last between 30 mins - 1 hour)
● Sprint Retrospective - last day of the sprint at 1 PM (usually after the Sprint Demo)
● Sprint Grooming/Story Refinement - once a week at 1 PM (usually can be for 1-2 hours to discuss stories for upcoming sprints)
Please make sure to have your numbers of team members and times of the meetings!
- What type of tests have you automated? How many test cases have you automated per day? When do you do automation in your sprint?
Mostly I have automated functional regression tests (including smoke and regression, database and API testing) and we do in-sprint automation of user stories. When developers are done with development of the user story and code is deployed to a QA environment, I test the user story manually and then do automation.
There is no right or wrong answer on the automation of test cases per day:
● It all depends on the functionality and complexity of the scenario.
● I always follow coding standards and focus on the quality of my scripts not quantity. Sometimes just find a right locator and specify dynamic xpath takes time
● Since I work in an Agile environment some days will be spent attending sprint meetings.
● When developers fix any bugs, I jump on retesting that bug based on its priority and severity. On top of that, when some of the team members have any challenges and need my help, I always try to help them.
Ask them how they do automation in their company.
- What is smoke testing and how do you run it in your project? How many test cases are there and how often do you perform smoke testing?
Smoke Test is a process where the software build is deployed to the QA environment and is verified to ensure the stability of the application. All the critical functionalities would be put to test here.
Once the build clears the first state, it will be taken for further QA tests, and if the build fails the test, it would be rejected.
A major benefit of running a smoke test is that it provides quick feedback within a matter of a few minutes and testers don’t have to wait hours to get results. In simple terms, we are verifying whether the important features are working and there are no showstoppers in the build that is under testing.
We have a dedicated pipeline for our smoke test within our Jenkins and since Jenkins is a web-based application, anyone can access it by using its URL.
Provide the following arguments during the initial configuration:
● Environment in which we need do the smoke test
● Browser: IE is default
● Suite: smoke test. Suite
And then whenever there is a code push our smoke test pipeline is automatically triggered. In my smoke suite I have around 12-25 scenarios that are executed within 10-15 mins.Runner.exe also creates a nice result file with the test cases details execution. Jenkins sends the smoke test result to the entire team members and in case of issues, developers can look into that immediately.
- What is regression testing and how do you run it in your project? How many test cases are there and how often do you perform regression testing? How long does your regression suite run?
Regression testing is a type of software testing where testers verify whether the previous functionality of the application is working fine, and the new changes have not introduced any new bugs.
When we perform regression testing: ● Bug fix ● New feature added ● Changes in existing feature ● Performance issue fix
Every company release will be scheduled differently.
Example: in 1 project there could be only quarterly releases while in the other every other sprint or every 4 sprints.
Here we need to pick 1 number.
How is the regression executed?
Regression is triggered by Jenkins.
For Cucumber: whenever we write test cases in our feature files we add @Regression tags for each scenario and later through the Regression runner class we execute those tagged scenarios.
For TestNG: we have regression TestNG XML in that we add regression related test cases.
Meanwhile, I also perform manual test cases execution and on top of that I always try to perform ad hoc testing.
Once execution is done, I will analyze results for any failed test cases. I will identify whether test cases fail due to environment performance issues, script related issues or application issues. Once I know that the script failed due to the application issues, I will retest that particular test case and try to reproduce the bug and verify it against requirements. Once I confirm the bug, I will log it into the Jira application providing a description of the bug with severity and priority level, steps to recreate and appropriate screenshots.
Execution time of regression depends on how many test cases you will have, just do
not say 10 mins or 30 mins!
Example: 300 test case/scenarios can be executed in about 3 hours
750 tests of GUI and API about 5-6 hours
1200 test cases (UI, database, API) - 9 hours
- How do you build an Object Repository in your project?
In our framework, we call objects as locators (such as ID, Name, Class Name, Tag Name, Link Text, Partial Link Text, XPath, and CSS).
- Please explain one of the most challenging situations you’ve ever had to resolve at work?
In this type of question, the best answer is to explain your starting workdays where you faced too many difficulties and how you made progress.
- Please tell me about the time you took the initiative on your project.
In this answer you should keep focus on yourself, however, don’t forget to give equal credit to your team members as well. Try to use examples where you went beyond your D2D role and took some additional responsibilities.
If you did anything for your colleague–for example offered to take their shift when they felt sick, or stayed overtime in work to help them with a heavy workload, you can definitely talk about this as an example of a time when you showed initiative.
- How do you approach issues and what’s your process?
explain how you prioritize and then break your task into smaller pieces and the approach you have followed to achieve one goal at a time.
- How would you handle unplanned changes?
Changes in the Agile environment are very common. This is the time you need to showcase your flexible mindset, attitude towards frequent changes and your willingness to embrace changes with an open mind.
- What is the difference between SDET & Software Testers?
● Test Engineer thinks only in the terms of pass or fail of a test case and how to break the software
● Test Engineer works only for test life cycle, like design of test cases, and execution
● No coding knowledge is required
● Test Engineers know where repetitive work or simple data entry is present, but they are not expected to minimize the repetitive tasks
● Test Engineers are not expected to reach up to code level and tune the performance
● SDET knows system functional objectives as well as quality objectives
● SDET is involved in Designing, development, and testing
● SDET has Dynamic skill sets, like knowledge of quality and testing and good in coding too
● SDET understands automation needs, they can code and provide a solution to the team where repetitive kind of work is killing the time.
● They can design a framework which can help the testing team to reduce repetitive test cycles or simple data entry tasks.
● SDET are Well aware of Performance tuning and security threats, they can suggest and reach to the code and suggest where application is poor in performance, plus they can optimize the code
- Tell me about your framework
Let me elaborate on the structure of my framework.
The current project that I’m working on has a hybrid framework which supports behavior driven development and data driven testing.
Maven: First, we have a Maven project that helps build project structure, manage project dependencies and execute automated scripts. In the Page Object Model file (or POM file) we add all dependencies that are required for the project. Some of these dependencies are Selenium, Cucumber, JUnit, JDBC, and Rest Assured.
Now my framework is organized into 2 main packages, first being resources where there’s no technical content and the second package is for Java which houses all code.
part of the resources is Config Reader: In this class we are extracting the value of our browser and url from properties file and using those values at the WebDriver initialization and navigating to the specific url.
Feature file:
here we are writing our test cases to test UI, Database and API. Our tests are written using the Gherkin language and its keyword Given, When, Then along with the Background keyword, Scenario and Scenario Outline. We also use tags in order to execute smoke and regression test cases in our feature files.
Now in our Java Package
Step Definitions:
In this we are actually implementing our automation scripts and logic using Selenium and Java and performing validations using JUnit assertions.
Pages:
My framework is built using a POM approach to eliminate code redundancy, improve code reusability and make it easy to maintain. In this we are storing information about pages, it’s elements and actions that need to be performed. We are using @FindBy annotation to locate the element and PageFactory to initialize all elements.
Common Methods:
In this we are going to outline the common reusable function for example mouse hover, handling alerts, frames and windows, taking screenshots, and javascript executor.
Constants: This class holds the information which is static final in nature and remains the same throughout the entire framework such as path to the configurations, reports, operating system type, implicit and explicit waits.
Cucumber Hooks:
using @Before and @After annotation we call the setup method that initializes our driver and we call the method to initialize all page elements. Also using the @After hook we are taking screenshots on every failed scenario.
Runner: It's the execution point of our framework. In our runner class using Cucumber options we specify configurations of our tests. We have separate smoke, regression and API runner classes.
DBUtility: In this class we store functions to open database connections, extract data from database and store in Java Data Structures, such as List, Map or List of Maps.
APIUtility: Here we store the API Constants with the help of of REST Assured (a Java library) and the Payload Constants class with the help of JSON Object. Also, there's the APIWorkflow steps
Target:
The last component is the target folder where all Cucumber Html and advanced reports will be generated successfully in the target folder.
- Automation challenges and how did you solve them? What are the challenges you face when running automation scripts? Overall challenges?
Scenario 1: Maintenance of Web Elements
When I first joined the company, we faced issues with maintaining elements. Framework was not properly structured and maintenance of it was taking more time than automation of new features. With the help of my team, I implemented the POM concept in our framework. I gave a demo of the new design to the entire team and once it was approved, we continued our automation. As of now we have a complete robust framework that is easily maintainable and understandable by any automation engineer that joins the team.
Scenario 2: Dynamically changing elements on the web page
To resolve that issue, we can go for XPath, where I can use contains or start with:
//div[contains(@id,’post-body’)]
//div[starts-with(@id,’post-body’)]
Also, I can create my own custom XPath by using parents or preceding/followingsiblings:
//label[text()=’DateofBirth’]/following-sibling::img[@class=’ui-datepicker-trigger’]
Scenario 3: Stale Element Reference Exception:
In my current application sometimes, we get errors saying Stale Element Reference Exception for some specific elements. After analyzing failure issues, I implemented WebDriver waits and JavaScript executor to handle those errors.
Scenario 4: Cross browser Testing issues
In every project it is required to perform multi-browser testing to make sure that the functionality is working as expected with every browser to give equal user experience to all of the wide range of Users. Our selenium test scripts were executed properly in Chrome Browser, but in Edge browser we faced so many issues like timeout problems/Synchronization problems…We found that Edge Browser is slower than Chrome browser in Test case execution, so we implemented both implicit and explicit wait for our scripts and also changed some of the locator from xpath into the CSS. On top of that since we work in agile, and we work closely with developers whenever they are working on new features, I asked them to provide ids for the elements.
Scenario 5: Working with dynamic values in WebTable
Data in Web Table mostly is always dynamic, so we cannot hardcode any cells or rows elements. Every time we work with WebTable we will have to loop through each row and cell
Scenario 6: Validation of Data from UI, Database, API
In my current application we support ui, database and API automation. Data that has been returned from those parts of the application is in different formats. I have developed functions to retrieve data from UI, JSON object and ResultSet Object into a Java data structure which is a List of Maps.
Scenario 7: Selenium works only for Web Based applications and does not provide any reports. Selenium cannot automate captcha and barcodes
- What have you done to improve the performance of your framework?
● Create reusable component
● Write optimize function with precise logic
● Follow coding standard
● Write locators to handle dynamic elements
● Provide data in external files such as excel, txt, property files
Please give some examples of common methods, Excel, DB or API utility when answering this question.
