Software Testing Interview Questions to know in 2024

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What is software testing? In the olden days, all the work activities were performed by human beings. Nowadays, many of these activities are performed by-products (machines). These products were installed with software to complete the activities that were earlier performed by human beings and are now automatically performed by machines with minimum human intervention.

To build this software, we have to follow certain steps. That is nothing but Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This cycle has mainly five phases, Requirements, Design, Implementation, Testing, and, Maintenance phases. And, the fourth phase is Software Testing.

Software testing is an activity(or set of activities) performed to compare the expected outcome with the actual outcome of one specific task in the system, component, or process and report the defects or bugs found in the system.

Defects in software have caused loss of money, time, reputation, and life. To ensure that the software performs the intended function, the defects in them must be identified and fixed well before the software is released into the real world. 

This paper contains the details related to software testing interview questions. I have carried out thorough research to compile the details. I have also included a few details, which were experienced by the industry experts in the manual as well as the automation field of software testing. If you are preparing for the software testing interview, this paper will be very helpful.

Software Testing interview questions

1. What is the objective of software testing?

The objectives of software testing are

• Preventing defects from entering the system
• Finding defects existing in the system
• Measuring the system quality

2. What is the difference between Debugging and Software Testing?

Whenever the interviewer asks the above question during a software testing interview, if the question is not clear or you want to take extra time to understand, you can request the panel member to repeat the question before you start answering the below details.

• Testing identifies the presence of defects and shows the failures caused by the defects. Whereas Debugging finds, analyzes, and removes the cause of failure.

• Software testing is carried out on the coding as well as other artifacts. whereas debugging is carried out on the code only.

• Testing engineers (Testors) carry out the software testing, whereas the coders (programmers) carry out the debugging.

3. What are the biggest qualities that a software tester should have?

The tester should have analytical problem-solving skills, he should have the ability to think out-of-the-box requirements, better knowledge about the domain in which we are working, the applications which are launched/available in the market, and, better communication skills.

4. What is the Software Testing Life Cycle(STLC)?

The activities performed during the testing of the software is called the software testing life cycle. In this life cycle, the software has to go through six different phases.

5. What are the first two phases of the Software testing life cycle?

• Requirement analysis and validation is the phase where the requirements documents are validated and analyzed. Here, the scope of testing is defined.

• Test planning is that phase in which test plan strategy is defined, estimation of test effort is defined with automation strategy and tool selection is also done.

6. Differentiate between the test design analysis phase and the test environment setup in STLC.

Test Design and Analysis is a phase where the test cases are designed, test data is prepared then automation scripts are implemented. Test environment setup, here a test environment closely simulating the real-world environment is prepared.

7. Explain in brief the test execution and test closure phases of STLC.

• In the test execution phase, the test cases are prepared, and bugs are reported and retested once they are resolved.

• Test closure and reporting are nothing but a test closure report are prepared to have the final test results learning, summary, and test metrics.

8. What is manual testing?

Manual testing refers to the process of testing in which the test cases are executed manually without the usage of any automated tool. Manual testing is one of the most widely used testing processes because in this process of testing, we can find out all the defects either visible or hidden. One of the biggest reasons behind using manual testing is we can’t automate the software 100%.

9. What are the important methods of manual testing?

The three important methods of manual testing are black box testing, white box testing, and grey box testing.

10. Explain briefly the methods of black box and white box testing in manual testing.

• The black box is the testing in which a person does not have the knowledge of coding, here we can only check if the final product is working. I.e., we check only the functionality of the software.
• White box testing is where a person should have knowledge of the internal coding and the structure of the existing software.

11. What do you mean by grey box testing?

Grey box testing is a mixture of both black box and white box testing. It is mainly done by a person who knows both coding and testing.

12. What are the types of Black box testing?

The types of black box testing are Functional testing and Non-functional testing.

13. Explain briefly Functional testing. 

Functional testing is one type of black box testing in which different parts of the software are tested and checked whether we are getting the expected output for that part or not. Here testers check the program, not the whole system.

14. What is Non-functional testing?

Non-functional testing is another type of black box testing which tests the performance, load, stress, usability, and compatibility testing, it provides a detailed description regarding software product performance and used technologies.

15. How is unit testing different from integration testing?

In unit testing, we check the independent and individual units or modules of the system software.

Integration testing is the testing where we integrate all the modules one by one and check the compatibility issues(whether one module is compatible with the other module or not)

16. What is system testing?

In system testing, we put the software in a different environment or operating system and check whether the software is compatible with the new environment or not.

17. What are static and dynamic tests?

• Static tests are performed without running or executing the software code. Whereas the dynamic tests are performed by running or executing the software.

• Most all the artifacts created throughout the Software Development Life Cycle(SDLC) like the documents, designs, code, and user interface are capable of being static tested. Whereas dynamic tests are concerned only with testing the functioning of the executable code.

• The static test is distributed throughout the Software Development Life Cycle. Whereas the dynamic test is conducted only after the coding phase of the SDLC is completed.

18. What do you mean by performance testing?

It is a type of non-functional testing in which the performance of the system is assessed under expected or higher load. There are various performance parameters that are evaluated during performance testing, they are response time, resource usage, reliability, scalability, etc. There are different types of performance testing which are Load, Stress, Endurance, Spike, and Volume Testing.

19. What do you mean by bug leakage?

When a bug or defect in the software, which was escaped from the testing team while testing and the function (Software) is released to the production environment. And now, if that bug was found by the customer, then we call it bug leakage.

20. What are the root causes of the defect?

In order to prevent new defects and detect existing defects, it is important to understand how they enter the system in the first place. A few of the root causes are human errors, time crunch, code complexity, heterogeneous and interconnected technologies, and environmental conditions.

21. What is the severity?

The impact caused by the bug or defect in the software on the customer business workflow is called its severity. If you are raising any bug and if its impact is more, then it comes under high severity bug. If the impact of the bug on the customer business workflow is less, then the severity is low.

22. What is the priority in software testing?

If a bug is raised in any application, the sooner the developer wants to fix that bug is becomes its priority. Also, the Importance given to the bug to fix it is called priority.

23. What is the difference between test cases and test scenarios?

• A test case is a low-level documentation and a detailed one whereas a test scenario is high-level documentation.

• The test scenario has a single line. Test cases have various components and each component has multiple steps.

• It will be difficult to test the application until and unless you have good project knowledge to execute the scenarios. Whereas, by looking at the test cases, you can easily test any application no matter whether you have good project knowledge or not.

24. What do you mean by a test case?

A test case is nothing but a set of actions that are carried out on a system to determine if it satisfies the software requirements and functions properly.

25. Can AI be applied in software testing?

Software testing takes a lot of time, capital, and resource utilization. In recent times, because of continuous deployment, we need to do continuous testing to deliver an effective product to the customer. Most part of the testing is just repetitive work to check the functionalities of the existing software. So we can better adapt AI here to do the automation without manual intervention and also it will help to identify the application problems by creating an innovative environment. 

26. What is automation testing?

Automation testing refers to the testing process in which we do testing on various new parts of software using a little bit of human interaction or no human interaction. In automation testing we need some separate software (not the software being tested), to test the software. 

27. Which process is followed in automation testing?

The process followed in automation testing is as follows

• Prepare the software to test the software.
• Perform the testing scenarios.
• verify/validate the test results.

28. What are the benefits of using automation testing?

Benefits of using automated testing

• Reusability
• Consistency
• Running tests anytime
• Early bug detection
• Less human interaction
• Time efficient

29. What type of tools are used in automation testing?

There are different tools that are used in the automation testing process. These tools are categorized based on the type of application and the purpose of testing. Some of the popular and commonly used tools are as below

• Web-based applications: Selenium Webdriver, Watir, Cucumber
• API Testing: Katalon Studio, APIGEE, Postman, SoapUI, REST-assured.
• Mobile Applications: appium, unified functional testing(UFT), test complete mobile
• Legacy applications: Rational Functional Tester (RFT)
• Cloud Testing: SOASTA cloud test, Load Storm, Sauce Lab
• Performance Testing: Load Ninja, Apache JMeter.

30. What is API testing?

API is a mediator which helps the two applications communicate and exchange data with each other. API testing is a process of software testing which tests the APIs directly by their functionality, reliability, performance, and security. This type of testing validates the logic of the build architecture within a short time.

31. What do you mean by conditional sign-off?

Sign-off is that we are good to take this product to the market. Conditional sign-off is a situation, in which we have released the software to the market with few pre-conditions. The preconditions are, that there were a total of 10 modules to test, but due to time constraints, we were able to test only 8 modules, and two modules could not be tested. So while signing off your product, you wrote that functionality is working perfectly fine, But we could not test two modules. The release of the software with pre-conditions is called a conditional sign-off.

32. What is beta testing or beta environment?

In the Q environment, where you will be testing your application, before pushing that code into the production environment, there is a beta environment. The beta environment is a stage just before the release of the software to the production environment. Hence, the endpoints will only be visible to the particular test engineer. Whereas in a production environment, the endpoints will be visible to everyone.

33. What are release notes?

When the test engineer gives software to the customer, they will give one release note to the customer. That release note consists of

• The defects present in the software.
• The defects found in the previous release which they resolved.
• Installation steps.
• The platforms they have tested the software, i.e., compatibility test.

34. While working on a particular application, if you receive additional new requirements, how are you going to incorporate them?

• First, understand the requirements.
• Identify all the possible scenarios.
• Then, convert it to the test case.
• Give the test case for review.
• After getting approval, start the traceability matrix, whether I have retained all or at least one test case for all the features.
• Then start execution.
• Start defect tracking process.
• Retrospect project closing meeting.

35. What type of testing can be automated?

We automate test cases to do smoke and sanity testing and regression testing. Sometimes based on the test time estimation and the project, we will be focusing on end-to-end testing. 

36. What is Smoke testing?

In smoke testing, you are testing the application at a very high level. You are not going too deep down into each and every part of the application. Just check if it is working perfectly fine or not. So, it is also called shallow and wide testing.

37. What is sanity testing?

Sanity testing is narrow regression testing that focuses on one or a few areas of functionality. These types of activities are called narrow and deep testing.

38. Which test cases (type) can be automated?

• Smoke/Critical tests
• Tests with several combinations
• Graph test cases
• Higher manual execution time
• Test case with many database updates
• The test execution rate is high
• Data-driven test cases
• Test cases with higher complexity

39. What is a Framework?

A framework is nothing but a set of rules of the best practices that we can follow in a systematic approach to achieve desired results. There are many automation frameworks and the most common are

• Keyword Driven Testing Framework
• Hybrid Testing Framework
• Behavioural Driven Framework
• Data-driven testing framework

40. What are the advantages of using a test automation framework?

• Low-cost maintenance.
• Maximum Coverage
• Minimal manual intervention
• Reusability of code.
• Easy reporting.

41. Why selenium automation tool is the preferred tool?

A selenium automation tool is the preferred tool because of its advantages in doing automation testing which are

• It is a free open-source tool
• It has a large user base and also helps communities
• Compatibility with cross-platform
• It supports multiple programming languages

42. What are the biggest advantages of TestNG that you have?

• TestNG can be used in both dot net and java languages. We can create an extended HTML report in TestNG
• Group and parallel execution can be carried out
• We can also run multiple test cases at the same time
• We can use many annotations in TestNG

It is not mandatory that you explain all the above points during the software testing interview, but good to touch on many points.

43. What do you mean by soft assert and assert? Give one difference.

With assert, you are doing the comparison. When the comparison fails, the assert will stop executing. But, While doing soft assertions, even though the comparison fails, the program will execute itself.

44. What is a locator?

The locator can be entitled as an address that recognizes a web element, especially within the webpage. Locators are the HTML properties of a web element that tell the selenium about the web element it needs to perform the action on.

45. What is the purpose of Selenium locators?

Selenium locators are used for identifying the web elements on the web page. And these are used to perform actions on text boxes, checkboxes, links, radio buttons, list boxes, and other web elements.

46. What are the different types of selenium locators?

There are 8 types of locators in the Selenium web driver to find elements on web pages

1. Id 2) name 3) tagName 4) className 5) linkText 6) partialLinkTest 7) xpath 8) cssSelector

47. Why do we need to use different locators?

Based on the professional experience and knowledge of the developer, they may not provide all locators for all elements, they may repeat the locators without any intent to duplicate the locators. In order to identify the elements, it is required to incorporate at least one good locator.

48. What do you mean by object Repository?

Object Repository cites the gathering of web elements belonging to the application Under Test also with their locator values.

49. How can we create an object repository in Selenium?

The objects created in the selenium can be stored in an Excel sheet, if required these can be installed inside the script. This is how we can create an Object Repository in Selenium.

50. What is configuration management?

Configuration management (CM) is a process of systems engineering to consistently maintain system resources, computer systems, servers, software, and product performance. The configuration Management system records the changes made in the system. And ensures that the performance of the system is as intended even though changes are made over time.

Conclusion

Any career in the field of IT will flourish even more in the coming years. Particularly if you choose a software testing course as your career, you made a safe choice. And the above software testing interview questions will surely help in adding up to your knowledge. If you feel the above software testing interview questions are appropriate. Then, check out the software testing course by Henry Harvin.

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