QA interview questions
Manual and automation testing interviews — process, test design, and the tooling these roles are actually asked about.
32 questions, and for 10 of them what a good answer has to cover. This is the bank Answers Ready practises you against — the same questions, marked on the same points.
introduction
Tell me about yourself.
What a good answer covers
- A shape, not a life story: what they do now, one thing they are good at, why this role.
- Under two minutes.
- Ends pointed at the job rather than trailing off.
defects
What is the difference between severity and priority?
What a good answer covers
- Severity is impact on the system; priority is urgency of the fix.
- They are independent — the candidate should say so explicitly.
- An example of high severity with low priority, or the reverse. A crash in a feature nobody uses; a typo in the company name on the landing page.
What makes a good bug report?
What a good answer covers
- Steps to reproduce that someone else can actually follow.
- Expected versus actual, stated separately.
- Environment, build or version.
- Evidence: logs, a screenshot, a network trace.
- A title that says what is broken, not 'it doesn't work'.
A bug only reproduces sometimes. How do you handle it?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
test design
How would you test a field that accepts a number between 1 and 100?
What a good answer covers
- Boundaries: 0, 1, 100, 101.
- Equivalence classes rather than every value.
- Non-numeric input, empty, negative, decimals, very long input.
- Names the technique — boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning.
How would you test a login page?
What a good answer covers
- Splits functional from non-functional rather than listing cases at random.
- Valid and invalid credentials, empty fields, case sensitivity.
- Security: lockout after failed attempts, password not in the URL, session handling on logout.
- Usability and accessibility get a mention.
process
You are asked to test a feature and there are no requirements. What do you do?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
How do you decide what goes in a regression suite?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
The release is tomorrow and you have found a serious bug. What do you do?
Senior. Marked against your own answer in the app.
What does QA do before there is anything to test?
Senior. Marked against your own answer in the app.
testing types
What is the difference between smoke and sanity testing?
What a good answer covers
- Smoke: wide and shallow, does the build work at all, run first.
- Sanity: narrow and deep, does this specific fix or area behave, run after a change.
- Does not confuse the two or claim they are the same thing.
automation
What would you choose not to automate?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
One of your automated tests fails about one run in five. What do you do?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
Explicit waits versus implicit waits — which do you use, and why?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
What is the Page Object Model, and what does it buy you?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
How do you choose a locator for an element?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
api testing
When would you test something at the API level rather than through the UI?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
You are testing a POST endpoint. What do you check?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
What is the difference between a 401 and a 403?
What a good answer covers
- 401: not authenticated — we do not know who you are.
- 403: authenticated but not allowed.
- A concrete example of each.
sql
How do you use SQL in your testing?
What a good answer covers
- Verifying that a UI action wrote what it should have.
- Setting up test data and cleaning it up afterwards.
- Names actual constructs: joins, where, count, order by.
- Understands that checking the UI alone can miss a write that silently failed.
strategy
What is the test pyramid, and do you agree with it?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
How do you know your testing is any good?
Senior. Marked against your own answer in the app.
collaboration
A developer closes your bug as 'works as designed'. What happens next?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
ci/cd
Where do your automated tests run, and when?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
coding
You are the first tester on a new project. How would you build the automation framework from scratch?
Senior. Marked against your own answer in the app.
Which object-oriented ideas do you actually use in a test framework?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
An element's id changes on every page load. How do you write a reliable locator for it?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
Talk me through the code you would write to check that a user can log in and see their name in the header.
What a good answer covers
- Arrange, act, assert — setup, the action, then one meaningful assertion.
- Asserts on the name being right, not merely that an element exists.
- Test data comes from somewhere repeatable, not a hardcoded live account.
- Cleans up or is independent of other tests.
- Speaks in real syntax for a real tool rather than pseudocode.
You need to run the same test against forty sets of input. How do you structure that?
Mid-level. Marked against your own answer in the app.
Your suite takes ninety minutes. How do you make it faster?
Senior. Marked against your own answer in the app.
How do your tests get from your machine into the shared suite?
What a good answer covers
- Branch, commit, pull request, review — the same workflow as the developers.
- Their test code is reviewed by someone.
- Handles a merge conflict without alarm.
- Bonus: tests live in the same repository as the code they test, and why that matters.
What makes automated test code bad, in your experience?
Senior. Marked against your own answer in the app.