What's the Deal with QA Testing Interview Questions?

Once you have been to a certain number of interviews, you will notice that there are a lot of common questions that you will be asked by different interviewers. Sometimes differently worded, but most of the time the similar knowledge check will be required of you. This is especially the case if you are applying for a tester role for the first time, it may be for your first job ever, or a career change in IT, or if you're coming from another background. The goal of this post is to help people ace their interviews, and also to stimulate them to learn more about testing. Simply memorizing answers by heart will do you no good in the long run - you might find yourself in a situation where you bit off more than you can chew, let's say you find online a bunch of common QA interview questions, just memorize them without any understanding of the topics, bluff your way through the interview and you start working - the employer things you know what you claimed and expects a certain level of independence from you, for most people this situation will usually lead to the most likely getting fired after a while - after all this would be cheating. So to make sure that doesn't happen I'll try my best to make sure that answers to the most common testing questions are informative and clear to understand, but ultimately gaining a deeper understanding of a certain topic is on the readers themselves.

It's important to note that in interviews there are some questions only you can answer, such as:

• - Describe your testing experience.
• - What kind of testing have you done?
• - What kind of testing tools have you used?
• - How was testing done in your organization?
• - Have you ever missed a bug in your testing and how did you handle it?

Note, that these questions seem like they mostly make sense if you previously worked as a QA tester, or similarly name role. However, even if you're applying without having worked as a tester in a company, there are still relatively easy ways to get some testing experience, doing some testing as a freelancer, using crowd-testing platforms, also if you are coding make sure to test your own code!

Now, there is a whole bunch of online resources where you can find samples of the most typical QA interview questions, things like: 

• - What is a test plan?
• - What is a test case?
• - What is a test step?
• - What is the difference between priority and severity?

You get the general picture and since these are available in abundance I won't be covering such things here. The most important part of the interview is demonstrating that you know what you are talking about - to prove that you did not just memorize a few new terms in hopes of landing a job. If you don't have formal work experience you will have to get creative a bit. In concrete terms, if you are applying for a junior tester role which involves automation, be sure to have samples of your work on GitHub - make a small automation framework by watching online courses and to learn more modify it to your needs - make it test your portfolio site or some other personal project which has meaning to you.

If you are in a position where you are applying to junior roles, reading online about common testing interview questions will be useful - you will also likely receive some sort of a task, to test a small dummy app so they can see how you approach testing. In case when applying for more of a mid or senior positions, people will assume you know the essential stuff and the questions will more likely be focused on your experiences in testing, more complex test automation, leadership, testing processes and best practices. 

Best of luck with those job interviews!