Software (Manual) Testing Interview questions

Here's a collection software manual testing interview questions and answers, most commonly asked in interviews.

1. Tell us about yourself? (This is to know the person and assess the communication skills)
Answer: This is a very personal question. You should briefly introduce yourself with details about your education, work experience and maybe career goals.

2. What is testing life cycle?
Answer: In general, software testing life cycle is a collection of various steps executed to ensure that the final product can be of the acceptable quality. The general steps in STLC include test planning, test analysis, test design, verification and validation and testing after implementation of the final product. It's important to note that the exact steps will vary from organisation to organisation because it's mostly defined by the policies of the organisation related to quality assurance.

3. Explain SDLC and your involvement?
Answer: SDLC is an abbreviation of software development life cycle which is basically the steps through which any software product goes through. It starts with 'requirements gathering' phase, analysis of requirements, design of the system, implementation, testing and maintenance. Though 'testing' is listed as a separate stage in the SDLC, it's important to note that testing is a continuous process that begins at the time of first phase i.e. during requirements gathering and continues until and after the system is deployed.

4. Tell us the process you follow in your organization?
Answer: This is a tricky question. You'll have to be fully aware of the various processes that are followed in your organisation to carry out the testing activities. If you're asked this question, you'll have to ask the interviewers (or tell them on your own) about the specific task for which the processes were followed in your organisation. For example, your organisation may have a process for the development of the test plan or test cases documents. You'll have to inform them the same.

5. What is boundary value analysis?
Answer: Boundary value analysis is what the name suggests - analysis at the boundary conditions. Let's say the username field in your application requires the username not to exceed 10 characters. In such a case, the boundary value analysis will be to test the field for usernames with 9 characters and 11 characters. If the test passes, then you can be reasonably sure that there is no bug.

6. Explain Equivalent Partitioning?
Answer: Though the words look like it's kind of a rocket science, in reality it's just a technique used to reduce the number of test cases. Basically, you partition the data into sets of valid and invalid inputs. I found an excellent video that explains the concept in simple language -



7. What is bug life cycle?
Answer: Bug Life Cycle, again is the various stages through which it goes after it's discovered. So once the Quality Assurance Engineer discovers the bug, it's marked as "New", then the concerned authority will assign it to the developer where the status of the bug changes to 'Assigned', once the bug is assigned it's either 'fixed' or 'rejected'. In both the cases, the QAE will verify the bug and mark it as 'reopen' (if not fixed properly) or 'closed' if it no longer exists.

bug-life-cycle
Image Source: Bugzilla.

8. How to use QC?
Answer: QC is a short of Quality Center, a software testing related tool owned by HP. If you've used this tool, you'll know how to answer.

9. What is severity and priority, explain the difference?
Answer: Severity is basically an indicator of 'how big is the impact of the discovered bug/issue' on the software and 'priority' is how urgent it is to address (fix) it. A very good example of this would be failure at the login window with valid username and password. This type of bug is not only severe but also should be fixed on high priority.

10. When do you stop testing? ( I mean when do you say, testing is done?)
Answer: Software testing never stops and in fact, should be done as a continuous process throughout the life of the software. However it's not practical. In reality, the software testing stops when the software meets the defined quality criteria.

11. What do you write in a test plan?
Answer: A test plan is a strategy document that details the various approaches, steps and procedures the software testing team will follow to ensure the product meets desired quality. A comprehensive test plan will include (but not limited to) who will test what, the resources team will use, risk strategy etc. along with a well defined scheduled. You may refer to various test plan templates available on the Internet for the details.

12. What is test strategy?
Answer: Test strategy is again a 'method' that needs to be followed to carry out testing activity. It will clearly define team member's individual roles and responsibilities, use of testing tools, deadlines to be followed, what needs to be tested, the software testing environment required and schedule that the team needs to stick to.

13. What is risk analysis?
Answer: Risk analysis is, in simpler words, the analysis of things that may go wrong and coming up with preventive measures. For example, an important team member falling sick just before the delivery would pose a bigger risk to the delivery. One possible way to mitigate this risk would be to prepare team members to handle each other's responsibilities so that the missing team member's work can be shared.

14. If you have ‘n’ requirements and you have less time how do you prioritize the requirements?
Answer: In such a scenario, the most critical requirements need to be finalised with discussion from the client. In testing, requirements aren't really 'finalised' by the testing team.

15. What all types of testing you could perform on a web based application?
Answer: A typical web based application may undergo - Functionality, Usability, Compatibility, Performance (load testing, stress testing), Security testing.

16. What is smoke testing and what is sanity?
Answer: What would happen if you turn on a newly brought TV and you get smoke coming out of it? Smoke testing is basically to ensure that the basic functionality of the product (in TV's case, it should be displaying video when turned on) works fine. So you'll identify the most basic test cases you need to execute and perform them.

Sanity testing is similar - which ensures that the system or product functions without any logical errors. If you are testing a calculator app; you may multiply a number by 9 and check whether the sum of the digits of the answer is divisible by 9.

17. How do you find the regression scenarios if a defect is fixed?
Answer: Regression scenarios would be run on all the test cases that failed during manual testing because of the bug in software. Checking history of the bug may help identifying the regression scenarios.

18. What is the difference between bug, defect and a error?
Answer: There's actually no difference between 'bug' and 'defect'. It's basically an unexpected behaviour of the software. 'Error' too would fall in the same category; but many times errors are well defined. For example - 404 error in HTML pages.

PS: Answers added by #-Link-Snipped-#.

Replies

  • Saandeep Sreerambatla
    Saandeep Sreerambatla
    19.Tell about the responsibilites of you in your current project?
    Answer: In answer to this question, you should mention the project briefly and your role. For example, if you played the team member; your responsibilities could have been verification of the requirements, preparing the 'VOCT' document, interacting with the clients to make sure that the requirements are correctly understood, writing test cases and executing them. It helps if you could highlight specific achievements or customer appreciations that you received because of the responsibilities you handled. This will help you score more in your interview.

    20. What is RTM , and how do you use it?
    Answer: The RTM aka Requirements traceability matrix is a spreadsheet (aka a table) that establishes a relationship between the requirements and the relevant test cases that ensure that the requirement is addressed in the test case document. You can get a better idea by looking at any RTM template. You may mention the assumptions you've made which may come handy during the review.

    21. How do you generate reports using QC?
    Answer: Tools specific question.

    22. What is Agile metholodogy?
    23.What is V & V method?
  • Gurjeet Singh
    Gurjeet Singh
    Thanks ES 😀
  • Saandeep Sreerambatla
    Saandeep Sreerambatla
    21. How do you generate reports using QC?

    Though this is a tool specific question, there are many people who are using Quality Center (QC) as their defect management tool and generating many reports.

    So here it goes,

    In the analysis tab you have reports and you can directly generate many kinds of reports.

    The most commonly used ones (this could vary from organization to organization) Standard Defects Report.

    22. What is Agile metholodogy?
  • colakyngo
    colakyngo
    Hi,

    Thanks very much for this comment. It help me to think about my ideals.

    Tks again and pls keep posting.

    If you want to get more materials that related to this topic, you can visit:Communication skills interview questions

    Best regards.
  • Radhika Deshpande
    Radhika Deshpande
    Here are more commonly asked manual testing interview questions -

    1.Why and how did you get involved with QA, QE & software testing?
    Answer: I got involved with software testing while working on my final year engineering project. We found out that we were doing QA unknowingly just to ensure that the system was perfect at every time. We ended up doing unit testing, integration testing, functionality testing, smoke testing, UI & browser compatibility testing.

    2.What is the testing lifecycle and explain each of its phases?

    STLC :​
    STLC consists of the following :​

    Prepare for test Plan​
    Test Design​
    Test Execution​
    Bug reporting​
    Inspection and release​
    Client Acceptance​
    Support during acceptance testing​
    Test summary report​

    STLC is software test life cycle it starts with :-​

    1. Preparing the test strategy​
    2. Preparing the test plan​
    3. Creating the test environment​
    4. Writing the test cases​
    5. Creating test scripts​
    6. Executing​
    7. Analyzing the results the test scripts and reporting the bugs​
    8. Doing regression testing​
    9. Test exit​

    3.What is the difference between testing and Quality Assurance?
    Answer: Testing & quality assurance terms can be used interchangeably; but in corporate world, testing is used often to indicate the procedures, while QA is basically about holistic approach towards the overall testing methodologies.

    4.What is Negative testing?
    Answer: Negative testing is about testing the scenarios where the checks are performed 'against' the specified operational guidelines. For example, if the input field should accept not less than X characters; the tester will perform tests by entering X-1, X-2, X-20 characters and report the results. This is called negative testing.

    5.What was a problem you had in your previous assignment (testing if possible)? How did you resolve it?
    Answer: This would be a job specific question and should be answered in depth - with a systematic approach and methodologies followed.

    6.What are two of your strengths that you will bring to our QA/testing team?
    Answer: My logical skills enable me to think of the scenarios that aren't 'obvious' and my extensive knowledge of the software testing tools and techniques will allow me to perform better at the job.

    7.How would you define Quality Assurance?
    Answer: Quality assurance or QA is a collection of systematic processes implemented to ensure that the given system to be tested adheres with the specified quality guidelines.

    8.What do you like most about Quality Assurance/Testing?
    Answer: Software QA is the only way to ensure that the systems work as specified and minimize future losses & troubles.

    9.What do you like least about Quality Assurance/Testing?
    Answer: Nothing in particular; but it's a fact that most of the QA jobs are considered 'lesser' than the equivalent development jobs.

    10.What is the Waterfall Development Method and do you agree with all the steps?
    Answer: The explanation of waterfall development model is available on several websites. Explain the steps and tell which step you think is unnecessary (if you think any).

    11.What is the V-Model Development Method and do you agree with this model?
    Answer: Same as above.

    12.What is the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)? At what CMM level were the last few companies you worked?
    Answer: This is subjective - have an overall idea about the CMM levels and how it works.

    13.What is a "Good Tester"?
    Answer: There are several qualities that'd define a good tester: 1. Natural ability to find bugs in given system 2. Strong logical and analytical skills 3. Good team player 4. Flair for learning new skills, tools and domains and implementing them. 5. Following time-schedules.

    14.Could you tell me two things you did in your previous assignment (QA/Testing related hopefully) that you are proud of?
    Answer: Explain the bugs that you discovered that saved time and money for your clients and how you received appreciation from your clients.

    15.List 5 words that best describe your strengths.
    Answer: Eagle Eyed Vision, Patience, Quick Learning, Passion for testing, Deep interest in technology.

    16.What are two of your weaknesses?
    Answer: Being perfection oriented, haste in everything.

    17.What methodologies have you used to develop test cases?
    18.In an application currently in production, one module of code is being modified. Is it necessary to re- test the whole application or is it enough to just test functionality associated with that module?
    19.Define each of the following and explain how each relates to the other: Unit, System, and Integration testing.
    20.Define Verification and Validation. Explain the differences between the two.
    21.Explain the differences between White-box, Gray-box, and Black-box testing.
    22.How do you go about going into a new organization? How do you assimilate?
    23.Define the following and explain their usefulness: Change Management, Configuration Management, Version Control, and Defect Tracking.
    24.What is ISO 9000? Have you ever been in an ISO shop?
    25.When are you done testing?
    26.What is the difference between a test strategy and a test plan?
    27.What is ISO 9003? Why is it important
    28.What are ISO standards? Why are they important?
    29.What is IEEE 829? (This standard is important for Software Test Documentation-Why?)
    30.What is IEEE? Why is it important?
    31.Do you support automated testing? Why?
    32.We have a testing assignment that is time-driven. Do you think automated tests are the best solution?
    33.What is your experience with change control? Our development team has only 10 members. Do you think managing change is such a big deal for us?
    34.Are reusable test cases a big plus of automated testing and explain why.
    35.Can you build a good audit trail using Compuware's QACenter products. Explain why.
    36.How important is Change Management in today's computing environments?
    37.Do you think tools are required for managing change. Explain and please list some tools/practices which can help you managing change.
    38.We believe in ad-hoc software processes for projects. Do you agree with this? Please explain your answer.
    39.When is a good time for system testing?
    40.Are regression tests required or do you feel there is a better use for resources?
    41.Our software designers use UML for modeling applications. Based on their use cases, we would like to plan a test strategy. Do you agree with this approach or would this mean more effort for the testers.
    42.Tell me about a difficult time you had at work and how you worked through it.
    43.Give me an example of something you tried at work but did not work out so you had to go at things another way.
    44.How can one file compare future dated output files from a program which has change, against the baseline run which used current date for input. The client does not want to mask dates on the output files to allow compares.
  • Radhika Deshpande
    Radhika Deshpande
    What is testing life cycle?

    STLC :
    STLC consists of the following :

    Prepare for test Plan
    Test Design
    Test Execution
    Bug reporting
    Inspection and release
    Client Acceptance
    Support during acceptance testing
    Test summary report

    STLC is software test life cycle it starts with :-

    1. Preparing the test strategy
    2. Preparing the test plan
    3. Creating the test environment
    4. Writing the test cases
    5. Creating test scripts
    6. Executing
    7. Analyzing the results the test scripts and reporting the bugs
    8. Doing regression testing
    9. Test exit
  • Radhika Deshpande
    Radhika Deshpande
    What is test strategy?

    A Test Strategy document is a high level document and normally developed by project manager. This document defines “Testing Approach” to achieve testing objectives. The Test Strategy is normally derived from the Business Requirement Specification document.

    The Test Stategy document is a static document meaning that it is not updated too often. It sets the standards for testing processes and activities and other documents such as the Test Plan draws its contents from those standards set in the Test Strategy Document.

    Some companies include the “Test Approach” or “Strategy” inside the Test Plan, which is fine and it is usually the case for small projects. However, for larger projects, there is one Test Strategy document and different number of Test Plans for each phase or level of testing
  • Radhika Deshpande
    Radhika Deshpande
    What do you write in a test plan?
    • Overview of product
    • Purpose/Objective of this document
    • Testing Scope
    • Test Environment
    • Test Items
    • System Test Entrance/Exit criteria
    • Test Phases and Cycles
    • Roles & Responsibilities (it includes staffing and schedule)
    • Configuration Management
    • Dependencies and Risks
    • References
  • Radhika Deshpande
    Radhika Deshpande
    What is smoke testing and what is sanity?

    Sanity Testing
    - typically an initial testing effort to determine if a new software version is performing well enough to accept it for a major testing effort. For example, if the new software is often crashing systems, bogging down systems to a crawl, or destroying databases, the software may not be in a 'sane' enough condition to warrant further testing in its current state.

    Smoke test describes an initial set of tests that determine if a new version of application performs well enough for further testing.
  • Radhika Deshpande
    Radhika Deshpande
    Quality Center is a comprehensive test management tool. It is a web-based tool and supports high level of communication and association among various stakeholders (Business Analyst, Developers , Testers etc. ) , driving a more effective and efficient global application-testing process. Automation Tools like QTP & WinRunner can be integrated with Quality Center. One can also create reports and graphs for Analysis and Tracking for Test processes.
  • Radhika Deshpande
    Radhika Deshpande
    When do you stop testing? ( I mean when do you say, testing is done?)

    This can be difficult to determine. Many modern software applications are so complex, and run in such an interdependent environment, that complete testing can never be done. Common factors in deciding when to stop are:

    Deadlines (release deadlines, testing deadlines, etc.)
    Test cases completed with certain percentage passed
    Test budget depleted Coverage of code/functionality/requirements reaches a specified point Bug rate falls below a certain level Beta or alpha testing period ends
  • Bizlibati
    Bizlibati
    You can search for it.
  • Ankita Katdare
    Ankita Katdare
    #-Link-Snipped-# and #-Link-Snipped-# Thank you so much for such an informative post. A lot of engineers are referring to this discussion and gets benefited. If there are any testing professionals around, it will be great if you can add more questions. This can be a good database for people revising the basics just a day before their manual testing interview. 👍

  • skgowtham
    skgowtham
    its really helpful.. thanku very much.
    pls post automation testing same like this it will be helpful for us
  • Kaustubh Katdare
    Kaustubh Katdare
    We should ask #-Link-Snipped-# and #-Link-Snipped-# . Guys; can we have a similar discussion for all the Automation testing related questions?
  • Saandeep Sreerambatla
    Saandeep Sreerambatla
    Ideally we can have it , if we talk about automation it means there are several tools in the market.

    Let me post few questions on basic automation, and then we can go tool specific. I will take sometime tonight to do that.
  • Kaustubh Katdare
    Kaustubh Katdare
    Can we have more questions in this resource? Turns out that this is an important discussion for anyone looking for manual testing interview questions.
  • Kaustubh Katdare
    Kaustubh Katdare
    Update: Really looking forward to more software testing interview questions here. A lot of job seekers in the QA domain are referring here for questions and answers.
  • Saandeep Sreerambatla
    Saandeep Sreerambatla
    I will post questions, i got super busy with neo4j these days , but i think its high time i should come out my excuses and hibernation.
    Will post by monday end of day.

    PS: added a item in outlook!
  • Ankita Katdare
    Ankita Katdare
    I have a list of few questions -
    1. What is baseline testing?
    2. What is benchmark testing?
    3. Explain Branch Coverage and Decision Coverage.
    4. What is difference between Retesting and Regression testing?
    5. What is Mutation testing & when can it be done?
    6. What is the purpose of exit criteria?
    7. When is Decision table testing used?
    8. What are the different Methodologies in Agile Development Model?
    9. What do you mean by incident reports? When are they needed?
    10. What is Boundary value testing?
    11. What is the difference between STLC (Software Testing Life Cycle) and SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle)?
    12. What is the difference between UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and System testing?
    13. What is the function of software testing tool "phantom"?
    14. How will you conduct Risk Analysis?
    15. What is Fuzz testing and when it is used?
    16. What is N+1 testing?
    I think we can all pool in and come up with simple 3-4 line easy-to-understand answers for all the questions mentioned in this discussion.
  • Anuj36
    Anuj36
    Hi All,

    Gone through above thread and it was awesome and almost all questions are covered.

    But I have some queries and questions regarding manual testing interview questions.
    like:

    1.Priority & Severity based practical scenarios on 'mobile number' and 'e-mail id'.
    Or any other practical example

    2.If we are having 100 test cases and 4 hrs to execute ,how u will proceed

    3.To define frame work of testing assignment ?

    4.Difference between review,walkthrough and inspection.

    5.what would you do if the timelines are suddenly slashed to minimum for testing.

    6. What will be your step if a defect logged by tester has been rejected by the development team (Considering the case where all the documents are correct & developer is also correct).

    7.Difference between system testing and system Integration Testing.

    8.Suppose if one of the module at client side is not approachable and cannot be access by the development and testing team then how one can assure that the another module which is developed by team is correct and will work fine with the module at client side.

    9.Suppose at last moment before delivery of setup some issues comes in a application and no one is there to fix the issues and then what will be the approach of a tester.

    So these are some questions and queries from my side.

    Thank You
  • Ashadevi Padmanabhan
    Ashadevi Padmanabhan
    Thankyou so much
  • Ankita Katdare
    Ankita Katdare
    #-Link-Snipped-# #-Link-Snipped-# Could you guys answer some of the questions asked by #-Link-Snipped-# above?
  • Anuj36
    Anuj36
    I have some more additional questions.

    1.If suppose testet accept a built and while testing the feature you get one bug and this has been reported to developer also.Now the question is will tester go for further regression testing to test that feature.
    So should tester go for further regression testing or not.

    Ideally NO. Since that fix might impact many other changes.
    But in ideal world we define defect as Show Stopper, P1, P2, P3.
    If its Show Stopper, then you cannot proceed further, if its P1 also even though you can proceed the defect fix might impact other regions.
    So if the defect is minor , isolated and cosmetic you can proceed.

    2.what is plm ?

    Product Life Cycle Management, you get pretty good definitions in wiki. But in a nut shell the answer would be - Right from the start , design, engineer ,develop, test, deploy, maintain. so everything covers here.

    3.Role and responsibilities of tester while doing application migration testing.


    Can you elaborate a bit more here, Migration is different in different cases.
    case1:
    Migrate a platform ( integration platform) that means I am currently communicating with one Platform A that is managing my payroll and i am moving to Platform B.
    Here , most of the work (for both dev and qa) would be on the back end, so what ever the integrations you have for Platform B, we have to design , and test it. Integrations such as WebServices or Rest.
    SO all the cases for integration matters is to be tested here.

    Case2:
    Only Migrating the UI, Here the backend services remain the same, so testing the functionality of the application as well as Integrations is expected here. Since the new UI should also invoke the proper Backend calls

    (Just basic definitions, post questions if you have any doubts)

You are reading an archived discussion.

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