Thursday, May 17, 2012

Software Testing Interview

Most of my friends and colleague always discuss about technique of cracking interviews. We have observed very few are able to crack it down. the reason behind failure is, we always pretend to know few things and most of the time we are not aware of the concept from the core which builds up negative impression on interviewer.

I feel interviewer are not looking for a candidate who have core domain or product knowledge, for them it is a plus point even if you are aware of those terms. Want might interest them more is your logical thinking, analyzing skills, foundation testing skills and your positive learning curiosity. If you have good foundation testing knowledge and you are a good learner and good team player interviewer might also consider you as an eligible candidate for further rounds.

“Be careful what you pretend to be because you are what you pretend to be.”

One should be always confident during interview but I would always suggest one should be honest with the interviewer while answering question, push your brains as far as you can but don't pretend to be confident if you are not sure about something. Interviewer are smart enough to know if you are making it up or you are actually aware of those things.

One should answer interviewer's question in smart way, by not saying the terms which you are not aware of. By doing so you are creating greater possibility of being asked that question.

People tend to go through various internet sites looking for interview question, but I would honestly suggest if you are have good testing foundation knowledge you don't need these sites. As a good interviewer might ask few basic question (bookish question) but majority of your interview would be based on your analytical skills. They would throw various case study or situation to identify few testing scenarios, they might appear to be unsatisfied and many ask you to identify more scenarios. Hence they would judge you mostly on your analytical skills rather than your bookish knowledge.

Though there are few favorite tricky question which interview prefer to ask and one should know about them are:
  1. Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) 
  2. Defect (Bug) Life Cycle
  3. Types of Testing
  4. Severity Vs Priority
  5. Verification and Validation
  6. Smoke Testing and Sanity Testing
Please feel free to write comments if you like my post or else if your opinion is different or you may like to add any more points in them.