In many industries, an HR expert must be able to recruit qualified employees, especially when it comes to the position of QA Engineer. For this purpose, our team prepared a series of questions and answers for a successful interview to determine if a candidate is competent enough.
QA Engineer Characteristics
A Quality Assurance Engineer is a specialist who functionally tests software at all development stages. Sometimes it happens to mistakenly believe that the terms Quality Assurance, Quality Control, and Testing are the same, but it is wrong. And here is the difference:
- A Quality Assurance expert’s job is to set criteria, prevent errors, and choose the instruments to use.
- A Quality Control specialist analyzes test results, also identifies and removes any bugs.
- A Software Tester has to verify the compliance of the finished product.
An experienced quality assurance engineer should be hands-on in several things, including understanding the software growth cycle, preparing text documentation, refining test scripts, and drawing technical specifications to address defects identified after testing.
An Effective Job Interview Is Possible
There are many phases to a good interview for the QA Engineer position. After you determine the source of candidate interest in this specific job, a series of theoretical questions must get asked. But the most relevant part of the interview is some test tasks to establish the skills and level of understanding of a candidate.
We have compiled a list of questions for a successful QA interview with answers that will help you test the fundamental candidate knowledge. Use it as a guide to finding the candidate that fits your company the most.
What is the meaning of Software Quality?
It is a simple question to start the interview. A skilled candidate will answer you that for a tester, software quality is how close the developed product is to the expected outcome.
Speaking about Software Testing, what is it? Do you see the difference between validation and verification?
Often the answer lies in the question, like in this case. An experienced engineer knows that software testing purpose is validation, verification processes, and bugs checking. The verification process allows the expert to evaluate if the software fits all the product requirements. Meanwhile, validation involves checking the requirements themselves to see if they are correct and match the initial customer request.
How a testing process usually occurs?
It is necessary to start with a testing plan redaction and test artifacts generating. After the test execution, you can submit the bug report and error fix recommendation. The conclusion of the testing process consists of report writing.
What is a bug?
A bug is the inconsistency between software behavior actual and expected. What the expected behavior should be is usually known from business documentation.
Explain the meaning of the SDLC.
The Software Development Life Cycle is a combination of phases that a project needs to get through from its start to completion. Typical SDLC phases are Initiation, Concept Development, Planning, Requirements Definition, Design, Development, Testing, Deployment, Maintenance, Closure, Support.
When can you consider a bug as fixed?
After the reproduction steps described in the report, a bug can get considered fixed. When the software functionality that was previously affected by the bug gets restored, the error gets considered corrected as well.
What is Software Quality Assurance?
An expert will say that Software Quality Assurance is the process of software development activities improvement that includes various steps like design, code review, testing, implementation, and technical maintenance.
As HR, you can ask further questions regarding the applicant’s previous work experiences to understand better if the knowledge he has is enough for your company. Questions can be the following:
- What were your last job tasks?
- How did you deal with challenging situations?
- What role do you usually play in a team? Speak about your general objectives.
- Do you read any blogs or magazines related to your profession?
- Are there things that you do not like about your job?
In order to hire experienced specialists, the interview must be as thorough as possible. It will be better to ask more specific questions, including knowledge of programming languages and algorithms. A technical specialist will be able to help you the best.
