QA Scenarios interview questions

Judgement situations: no requirements, no time, a flaky suite, a production escape, a resistant dev team.

3 questions in QA & Testing.

QA and TestingA 24-minute read on how the topic fits together, before the questions.QA and testing fundamentals59 short answers on one page, for revising rather than studying.

medium2

mediumScenarioCoding

The interviewer hands you working production code with a few deliberate changes that break it. You have 45 minutes. What do you do before you read line one?

In a debugging exercise with planted breaks, get a feedback loop before you read closely. Ask what correct behaviour is, whether you can run it and its tests, and what counts as done, then let failing behaviour point you to the code. Small planted changes hide from reading and show up when the code runs.

5 minentry, mid, senior

mediumScenarioBehavioural

The release ships tomorrow and you are only halfway through regression. What do you do?

Re-plan the remaining time against risk rather than against the test-case order, then report coverage as an explicit list of what was tested, what failed and what was never opened. The recommendation is yours; the decision to ship belongs to whoever carries the business consequence.

7 minmid, senior, lead

hard1

hardScenarioCase Study

Every test passed and the release broke in production anyway. How do you work out what your suite was never going to catch?

Reconstruct the defect's exact path, then ask at which layer a test could have seen it and why none did, distinguishing a missing case from a whole condition your environments cannot reproduce, and fix the class rather than adding one test for this instance.

6 minmid, senior, staff, lead