Tips & tricks to ace QA interviews

Quality Assurance Engineers aim to help create quality products. The job description of a QA tester goes beyond finding bugs. It involves preventing defects, enabling fast development, and, most importantly, ensuring that the development process maintains quality standards and delivers results. That is why QA interview questions evaluate a QA engineer’s overall personality. To land a high-paying job, you must come across as a candidate who understands the job role and responsibilities and is eager to grow with the challenge.

Going through interviews is essential to gather the required expertise for further interviews. Still, we advise being prepared from the very beginning to avoid any unwanted surprises.

Here are the tips to ace your QA interview.

Clear knowledge of data structures, automation, and manual testing

Data structures are essential for software development. In automation testing, data structures are used for implementing user interface (UI) maps using dictionaries. Data structures you must be familiar with are lists, tuples, stacks, dictionaries, and queues.

The QA interview questions that test your fundamental grasp of data structures must be part of the preparation. Functional testing is an essential automation concept that you must know. It would help if you also understood the STLC (Software Test Life Cycle) in-depth used in manual testing.

Highlight experience with automation tools

Familiarity with the automation testing tools is essential. If you are well aware of the automated testing tools available, you can select the best ones to optimize the overall testing process, depending on the project.

Make sure to highlight your experience with automation tools you have used in the past. It will help interviewers gauge your value. 100% testing automation is rare, which is why a clever automation tester designs test cases that guarantee good test coverage. Explain how you choose the right automation testing tool for a project to achieve high ROI. Furthermore, you must know which tool can automate which test cases.

Selenium, Katalon Studio, SoapUI, WorkSoft, and Cucumber are some necessary automation tools. If asked about a tool you are not aware of, don’t panic. Let the interviewer know that you are looking for an opportunity to learn new tools and further improve your skills.

Knowledge of embedded domain testing and web domain testing

Testing is a vast domain, and regardless of its application, software must account for validity, performance, and scalability.

Suppose the position you are interviewing for is in the embedded testing domain. In that case, you should have a solid grasp of software unit testing, integration testing, system unit testing, system integration testing, and system validation testing.

Embedded software testing is challenging due to dependency on hardware and open-source software. It would help if you highlighted any test combinations you designed for embedded testing and what were the resulting scenarios.

Web testing is a more familiar domain. As digital transformation is rising, there is a demand for professionals who can effectively test web applications and websites for functionality, usability, security, compatibility, and performance. Functionality testing, usability testing, interface testing, compatibility testing, and database testing are essential concepts for web testing that you must be familiar with.

Master black box, white box, and gray box testing

The three most common testing techniques used in software testing are black box, white box, and gray box testing. You should know how each testing technique works. Rather than telling interviewers what skills you have in the context of the type of testing, help them see the larger picture. Explain what sort of test case you designed using which technique and why you chose it.

Assume you worked on an extensive cloud-based distributed SaaS application testing. Tell them how you utilized black box techniques such as equivalence partitioning and decision table testing to speed up the test case execution. Further, tell them how you accelerated the workflow testing for the application by implementing the branch coverage white box testing technique.

Don’t hold back when you have an opportunity to explain how you applied your skills in real-world testing.

Any personal manual and automation testing projects

If you worked on any individual project and devised a testing strategy that you think is relevant to the position you are interviewing for, do include it.

Here’s an example. I worked on a CRM for a small-scale vendor with four modules-login, customer dashboard, database, and inventory. I designed a gray box test case to test inventory and customer dashboard functionalities. For testing, I used Selenium, Jenkins, and SoapUI. Elaborate upon asking about bugs or errors that occurred.

Conclusion

If you consider the tips shared here, you can ace any QA interview and become a high-value candidate. Acquiring proper knowledge of the latest automation tools like Selenium and Cucumber and CI/CD tools like GitLab and Jenkins will set you apart from other candidates. Talent500 has a large community of pre-vetted QA engineers. Join us today to get hired by global companies.