100+ testing interview questions for beginners to get hired

Let’s face it.

Having a successful interview is a crucial step to becoming a software tester. It’s a “make it or break it”.

But passing an interview is hard. We all know this. It’s even 10x harder if you are a beginner in software testing when you do not have much knowledge and experience in both testing and interviewing. However, there’s no way that beginner cannot have a successful interview.

The secret? Be prepared!

Success is where preparation and opportunity meet – Bobby Unser

In this post today, I would like to introduce you 100+ software testing questions which are very very likely to be asked in the interview for tester position. By knowing these questions and getting prepared before going into the interview, you will be more confident and have a better chance to pass the interview.
Some important notes:

• I know… I know, some of these questions seem to be too general (and boring) to make sense to you, but how can I say…they are still asked in the interview. Anyway, our goal is not to prove that. Our goal is to pass the interview.
• Some of you may ask for answers for these questions, but I don’t have the time for now to provide reference answers for these questions. Don’t worry, I’ll surely do that soon. So, if you are interested in the answers, just let me know by entering your email address below.

Interview questions that are commonly asked

Before going into details of software testing related questions, you need to know that there are common set of interview questions asked in most (if not not all) interviews. Here they are:

#1. Tell me about yourself?
#2. Why should we hire you?
#3. What are your strengths?
#4. What are your weaknesses?
#5. Why do you want to work for us?
#6. Why did you leave your last job?
#7. What is your greatest accomplishment?
#8. Describe a difficult work situation and what you did to overcome it?
#9. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
# 10 Do you have any questions for me?

Even though these questions are considered as common, it’s not that easy to answer them. TheInterviewGuys.com gave excellent guide to these questions. You may want to check it out (http://theinterviewguys.com/top-10-job-interview-questions/ )

Software testing related questions

I categorize the questions into 3 groups:

Group #1: Warm-up – Get to know each other

# 11. What are the difficulties you often face during your testing?
#12. And how you overcome them?
#13. Why you choose software testing as your career?
#14. Could you tell us about your last project?
#15. What’s your role and responsibility in your last project?
#16. How did you learn your software testing knowledge?
#17. What are your salary requirements?
#18. Why was there a gap in your employment between [insert date] and [insert date]?

Group #2: Characteristics – What type of tester you are?

#19. How do you improve your software testing skills and knowledge?
#20. What are the characteristics of a good tester?
#21. What would you do if there’s conflict between you and other members in the project?
#22. How would you add value to the company? Could you give me an example?
#23. Tell me about a time when you disagreed with your boss.
#24. Please introduce a few big names in software testing industry that you know about?
#25. According to you, is the tester who finds the most bugs in the project the best tester? Why you think so?
#26. If you ran a test case and found no bugs, what does that mean?
#27. How does your ideal boss look like?
#28. What would you do if a developer could not reproduce your bugs?
#29. Have you often contributed ideas to improve the quality of the project or test process? Give an example of an improvement you made in your project?
#30. Suppose your boss wanted you to complete the testing by the end of the day, but you were still having a lot of test cases that needed to be executed, what would you do?
#31. What do you like the most and least about software testing?
#32. Which one is better, writing a bug report or going and talking directly with developer about the problem? And Why?
#33. Have you ever worked with a difficult developer? If yes, how did you handle to work with him?
#34. What would you do when your developers rejected your bugs?
#35. What if you spent the whole day exploring and finding bugs in the system, but you found no bug at the end of the day. How would you explain that to your manager?
#36. What’s your favorite software testing book? And non-software testing book?
#37. Testing is very challenging, what do you do to keep you motivated?

Group #3: Knowledge

#38. How to perform the test without specification document?
#39. What is exploratory testing?
#40. What is the purpose of white box testing?
#41. How do you determine what to test and what not to test in an application?
#42. What are the best practices for software quality assurance?
#43. When tracking a software testing project, what are the things you need to consider?
#44. What is the Requirement Traceability Matrix?
#45. What is risk-based testing?
#46. What is a bug?
#47. What is the V-model of software development life cycle?
#48. What is an equivalence partitioning technique in software testing?
#49. What are the basic elements in a bug report?
#50. What’s the difference between priority and severity in a bug report?
#51. What’s included in a Test plan?
#52. Why boundary value analysis is often a good test case?
#53. What are 7 principles of software testing?
#54. What would you do if the bug was leaked to the end user?
#55. Why does software have bugs?
#56. What is regression testing?
#57. What are the basic elements of a bug report?
#58. What factors determine the priority when testing?
#59. What is sanity test and when to perform it?
#60. What are things to consider when choosing a test automation tool?
#61. What are you based on to say if it’s a bug or not?
#62. What’s included in a test report? And benefit of the test report?
#63. In which order should tests be run?
#64. The advantages and disadvantages of GUI test automation?
#65. What are important tests in web testing?
#66. What’s the difference between verification and validation?
#67. What is the most important reason to apply a risk-based testing?
#68. Let’s say your manager gave you a specification document of a system and asked you to design test cases. What would you do?
#69. How do you estimate a testing activity?
#70. The later in the development life cycle the defect is discovered, the more expensive it is to fix. Why?

#71. How do you test a login screen on the web?
#72. When there is a conflict between you and the members in your group, how would you handle that?
#73. What would you do to improve testing processes of your company?
#74. Could you tell us about the most interesting bug you found?
#75. How you can minimize the risks involved in the project?
#76. What is a good test case?
#77. What’s the difference between re-testing and regression testing?
#78. What is a test coverage in software testing?
#79. What are different levels of testing?
#80. Why we need to automate a test?
#81. What are benefits of independent testing?
#82. During the testing process, testers found a bug and reported to developer, but developers do not agree that the bug. What should you do next?
#83. What are common mistakes can affect the project?
#84. What activities in the testing process?
#85. What are the basic components of a bug report?
#86. What would you do if you observe an intermittent bug?
#87. What is system testing?
#88. What kind of test we should not automate?
#89. What is the main benefit of early testing in software development life cycle?
#90. What’s the difference between the static testing and dynamic testing?
#91. What are the reasons why test projects fail?
#92. How to know the quality of test execution?
#93. How would you test if the requirements are changing continuously?
#94. Let’s say your manager gave you an application you are not familiar with and wanted you to test it and reported the test result by end of day. What would you do?
#95. What are challenges in testing activities?
#96. What is experience-based testing? And when to use it?
#97. What is Defect Removal Efficiency (DRE)?
#98. What is random testing? When will we use it?
#99. What would you do when you found a bug?
#100. When should we stop testing work?
#101. What are the criteria to consider automating a test case?
#102. What are the things you would do if you discovered a showstopper defect
#103. What are commonly used testing types?
#104. How do you know if your testing is effective or not?
#105. If you received a build from developer, but it has so many critical problems, what would you do?
#106. Can automated test replace manual test? And why?
#107. When to stop testing?
#108. How do you know if your testing is enough?
#109. In a test project, what testing activities can be automated?
#110. What are the different Methodologies in Agile Development Model?
#111. Should developer test his code? And why?
#112. What is the purpose of the bug report?
#113. What is black box testing? What are black box testing techniques?
#114. Is it the tester’s responsibility if there’s a bug escaped to end user? Why?
#115. What is testing to you?
#116. Defects often occur in what phase of software development life cycle?
#117. In what stage of SDLC you should start the software testing?

Final thought

There you have it, 100+ software testing interview questions to prepare for your interview. Like I said before, this list is not an exhaustive list, so don’t just solely rely on these questions to pass the interview. The reason is because the interview may change the way they ask the questions. What you should do is get to know these questions and see if you can answer them using your own words and knowledge. If you can’t, go and find out the answers by yourself.

So, that’s it!

I wish you luck and don’t forget to let me know how your interview is going 😀

What’s next?

You used to attend an interview and had interesting/weird/tough question you would like to share, just write me an email (thanh@asktester.com) or comment below