Software testing is the most critical phase of the software development life cycle. The software application under development has to be a quality deliverable to the client and should be error-free. It needs a systematic approach and foolproof planning. The errors should be recorded and fixed, and testing cycles should be done multiple times by professional testers until the product is error-free.
This article will discuss the best software testing interview questions to help you to prepare well for upcoming software testing interviews.
Top Software Testing Interview Questions
Let us divide the entire set of software testing interview questions into three levels, namely Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced.
Beginner-Level Software Testing Interview Questions
1. What is software testing?
Answer: is the process to ensure that a software product meets the client’s requirements and is error-free.
2. What are quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC)?
Answer: Quality assurance is the process of preventing errors and producing a quality software application. On the other hand, quality control ensures that a software application has the desired quality. It executes the code or program to find errors in software applications.
3. What is verification in software testing?
Answer: Verification is the process to ensure that the software under development meets the requirements. It involves inspection, reviews, walkthroughs, and so on.
4. What is validation in software testing?
Answer: Software testing of the product is validation. It validates that the product is error-free and meets the client’s requirements.
5. What is static testing?
Answer: Static testing involves reviewing the documents in the early stage of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) .
6. What is dynamic testing?
Answer: Dynamic testing is a type of testing that analyzes the dynamic behavior of an application's source code. Software testers carry out this type of testing during the execution of an application.
7. What is white-box testing?
Answer: We refer to White-box testing as glass box testing or clear box testing, or structural testing. In this type of testing, the testers analyze the application's internal structure, the used data structure, and implementation details.
8. What is black-box testing?
Answer: This is a testing method in which testers do not look at the internal code structure and test the functionality of the software product under development.
9. What is grey box testing ?
Answer: This is a combination of white-box and black-box testing . In this testing, the tester needs to have design documents to create test cases.
10. W hat is positive testing?
Answer: Positive testing tests what the system is supposed to do, i.e., whether it is meeting the requirements or not.
11. What is negative testing?
Answer: Negative testing is used to test what the system is not supposed to do, i.e., finding errors in the software .
12. What is the test strategy?
Answer: Test strategy is a high-level document prepared by the project manager at the start of the project based on business requirement specifications. It has the approach to be used for testing and meeting testing goals. This document is later used as one of the base documents to prepare test cases and more.
13. What is a test plan, and what are its contents?
Answer: A test plan is prepared by the Test Manager to list out the activities to be carried out on software while testing to deliver an error-free product. It is based on product description, use-cases, and SRS. Contents of a test plan are:
- Test Plan Identifier
- References
- Introduction
- Test items
- Approach
- Software risks
- Features to be tested
- Features not be tested – out of scope
- Items pass/fail criteria
- Suspension criteria and resolution requirements
- Test deliverables
- Environmental needs
- Training needs
- Resources required
- Responsibility
- Risks and contingencies
- Approvals
- Glossaries
14. What is the difference between a test strategy and a test plan?
Answer: Test strategy is a static document prepared at the organization level with the business requirements specifications as the base. In contrast, a test plan is a dynamic document that should always be up to date and ready at the project level with the base as use-cases, SRS, and product description.
15. What is a test suite?
Answer: A test suite is a collection of test cases that software testers execute to test the software application.
16. What is a test scenario ?
Answer: The test scenario is like a high-level test case. It decides what needs to be tested.
17. What is a test case?
Answer: The test case defines how to test the functionality. It has positive and negative executable steps of a test scenario. For example, Test scenario: Verify the login functionality
- Test case 1: Enter a valid username and a valid password (positive step)
- Test case 2: Enter a valid username and an invalid password (negative step)
- Testcase 3: Enter an invalid username and a valid password
- Testcase 4: Enter an invalid username and an invalid password
18. What is a testbed?
Answer: The testbed is the environment prepared for testing a software application. It has software, hardware, network configuration, the software application to be tested, and related software.
19. What is the test data?
Answer: The test data refers to the data the software testers use for executing test cases while testing. It is prepared manually ahead of testing or by certain tools.
20. What is a test harness?
Answer: The test harness is the software and test data configured to test a piece of software under varying conditions to monitor the output with the expected outcome.
21. What is a test closure?
Answer: Test closure is a note prepared by the testing team before ending testing that has a number of test cases tested, number of test cases not tested, number of errors found, number of errors closed successfully, number of errors not closed or fixed, numbers of errors rejected, and so on.
22. What are the activities of test closure in software testing?
Answer:
- Completion of testing. No. of test cases tested, skipped, error found, fixed, rejected, etc., should be documented and informed to respective persons.
- Handing over testbed elements to respective persons, especially maintenance and support staff. Also, known errors should be communicated to them.
- Lessons learned while testing should be documented for future releases and projects and learning passed on to respective persons.
- Archive the necessary results, logs, documents, and scripts, and so on in CMS (Configuration management system).
23. What is test coverage?
Answer: Test coverage is used to check the areas of software application covered by test cases so that if there are areas that are not included, test cases can be prepared for the same.
24. What is code coverage?
Answer: Used for unit testing only, code coverage is to see that test cases cover each part of code at least once. Testers or developers are responsible for performing it.
25. What is unit testing?
Answer: Unit testing corresponds to the process of checking each unit or program code module or unit-wise.
26. W hat is integration testing?
Answer: Integration testing helps to check the connection of two connected modules and may have been developed by two different developers. The integrator does it. It is done in three ways: Top-down, bottom-up, and big bang.
27. W hat is system testing?
Answer: System testing refers to testing the whole software product or all the integrated modules to verify whether it meets the specified requirements and functions properly.
28. W hat is top-down testing?
Answer: First, the high-level modules are tested, and then the low-level modules are tested and then integrating the low-level modules with the high-level modules, testing is done from top to bottom. Stubs are used in place of missing components.
29. What is bottom-up testing?
Answer: This testing follows the reverse approach of top-down testing. It starts with testing the low-level modules followed by the high-level modules. Next, the high-level modules are integrated with low-level modules, stubs are used for missing components or modules, and full testing is done.
30. What is the big bang approach?
Answer: Big bang approach is a way to perform integration testing. It corresponds to performing full functionality testing after integrating the whole application, i.e., all the modules. For missing modules, we use stubs and drivers.
31. W hat is functional testing?
Answer: Functional testing is testing all the functions of the software application to see if they are giving the desired result or not.
32. W hat is non-functional testing?
Answer: Load testing, performance testing, security testing, scalability testing, and compatibility testing are various forms of non-functional testing. Its purpose is to see how fast the application responds to user input.
33. What is acceptance testing?
Answer: Once the whole application is ready, the testers and users perform combined testing to see if the request is behaving as expected by the user so that the user can accept or reject the request. Alpha testing, beta testing, and gamma testing come under acceptance testing.
34. What is alpha testing?
Answer: It is done by end-users along with developers and testers at the developers' place.
35. What is beta testing?
Answer: It involves only end-users at the client’s place to see if the application is working as expected.
36. What is gamma testing?
Answer: It takes place before releasing the application at the client’s place.
37. What is smoke testing ?
Answer: Software testers perform smoke testing on Day 0 by the user to see if the build received is testable or not. This is done so that the whole testing is not done and time is not wasted if all bugs have not been fixed and some features are not working in it.
38. W hat is sanity testing?
Answer: Sanity testing takes place at the release phase to see if the main functionalities are working fine without going much deeper into them.
39. W hat is re-testing?
Answer: Retesting aims to ensure that bugs found in the previous releases have been fixed and are not present in the new release.
40. What is regression testing?
Answer: Regression testing is a type of software testing, which involves re-executing functional and non-functional tests to ensure that the new changes of functionalities do not affect the existing ones.
41. What is GUI testing?
Answer: Graphical user interface testing is to check to test the interfacing between the user and the application.
42. What is recovery testing?
Answer: Recovery testing aims to see how soon the system will come back to its normal state after a system crash.
43. What is globalization testing?
Answer: In this form of testing, an application is tested to ensure it works in different languages and regions as desired.
44. What is localization testing?
Answer: This is adapting the global application to a local region or language by adding local components.
45. W hat is installation testing?
Answer: Installation testing helps to test whether an application can be installed quickly and is giving the desired output after installation.
46. What is formal testing?
Answer: In this form of testing, testers test the application using pre-planned procedures and documents.
47. What is risk-based testing?
Answer: In this type of testing, software testers test the functions that are most likely to fail individually.
48. What is compatibility testing?
Answer: In this testing, the testers validate a particular application for its compatibility with different environments.
49. What is exploratory testing?
Answer: In exploratory testing, experts do the testing of the application by exploring and without knowing its requirements.
50. What is monkey testing?
Answer: In this testing, abnormal actions are performed on the software application deliberately to check its stability.
51. W hat is usability testing?
Answer: This form of testing checks whether the end-user can easily and comfortably access, explore, and use the application without any training.
52. What is security testing?
Answer: Security testing ensures that the data is secure in the system and it behaves as expected.
53. What is soak testing?
Answer: In soak testing, the software application is subjected to intense load for an extended period, and then it is observed if the form is working as desired or not.
54. What is performance testing?
Answer: In this type of testing , the speed, scalability, and stability of the application are tested. It checks the response time, throughput, and optimum utilization of resources. In short, performance testing checks how the application performs under different conditions.
55. What is load testing?
Answer: Load testing checks if the application gives the desired outcome or not under normal and peak load conditions.
56. What do you understand by volume testing?
Answer: In this form of testing, software testers check whether the application can handle massive amounts of data or not.
57. What is stress testing?
Answer: Stress testing checks if the application behaves as desired under increased load (more than it is designed for) conditions or not.
58. Explain concurrency testing.
Answer: It is a type of testing that verifies the behavior of the application when multiple users are accessing the application at the same time. Software testers primarily use concurrent testing to identify deadlock issues.
59. W hat is Fuzz testing?
Answer: It tests the coding errors of security loopholes in the application. By subjecting the claim to random data and deliberately trying to crash the application, fuzz testing checks if internally anything is breaking or not.
60. Why do we do adhoc testing?
Answer: This is the opposite of formal testing. Here, the experts who know the application well check it randomly with random data without any fixed plan, document, or predefined method.
61. W hat is interface testing?
Answer: This is done between two modules to see if the data is passed between them correctly, and if both modules communicate correctly.
Intermediate-Level Software Testing Interview Questions
62. What is the need for bucket testing?
Answer: Bucket testing compares two versions of the application to see which version performs better.
63. Explain exhaustive testing.
Answer: Exhaustive testing is testing all functionalities of the application with valid and invalid inputs.
64. What is the importance of early testing?
Answer: Early testing refers to carrying out testing in the early phases of SDLC . The primary purpose of early testing is to identify and fix errors early, which is less expensive than fixing errors at later stages of the software development life cycle.
65. What is error clustering?
Answer: Error clustering happens when one particular module of an application has maximum errors or failures.
66. What is the pesticide paradox?
Answer: When the same test cases are used again and again repeatedly for testing, and no new bugs are found, we call it a pesticide paradox . To overcome this pesticide paradox, we need to update our test cases to find new errors and failures in the application under testing.
67. Explain error cascading.
Answer: Error cascading is the phenomenon where one error triggers other errors in the application at later stages of SDLC.
68. What is an error?
Answer: The error is any variance between actual and expected outcomes.
69. What is a bug?
Answer: A bug is any mismatch that the software testers find in the application.
70. What is a product failure?
Answer: When the application is installed at the client location, and the client finds anything not working correctly, then it is a product failure.
71. What is bug severity?
Answer: Bug severity is the degree of the impact of a bug on the client’s business. It can be of critical, major, or minor severity.
72. Explain a bug priority.
Answer: A bug's priority decides its order of fixing. In other words, it determines the order in which the development team needs to fix the bugs. The development team first picks the bugs with high high-priority, then medium, and finally, low for fixing.
73. What is bug leakage?
Answer: Bug leakage happens when a bug is missed in the testing phase of the application and is found by the end-user in the client location.
74. What is a bug release?
Answer: Bug release refers to releasing a particular software application with known bugs. It is necessary to mention all these in the release notes.
75. What is the error age?
Answer: Error age is the time interval between the error identification and error resolution.
76. Explain error seeding.
Answer: Error seeding means introducing known errors in the application to see if the test can find them and to see how the application is performing with these errors.
77. What is a show-stopper error?
Answer: A show-stopper is an error, which does not allow the user or tester to move further. Hence, it results in an application crash. For example, if the login button is not working, then it is a show-stopper error. This is because even if you have a valid login name and password, you won't be able to log in and continue.
78. What is a hotfix?
Answer: A hotfix is a high-priority bug, and the testing team should immediately report it to the development team for fixing.
79. What is boundary value analysis?
Answer: Boundary value analysis means that errors are more likely to occur in the boundaries of partitions of the application.
80. What do you understand by decision table testing?
Answer: Decision table testing is that instead of input values, you have input conditions such as if then else. Conditions are input, and actions based on these conditions are output.
81. What is the entry criteria?
Answer: Entry criteria are the requirements that should meet certain conditions before starting the testing.
82. What is the exit criteria?
Answer: Requirements that should certain conditions before ending the testing are exit criteria.
83. What is the difference between SDLC and STLC (Software Testing Life cycle)?
Answer: SDLC deals with the development and coding of a software application, whereas STLC deals with the verification and validation of the same.
84. What are the valuable steps in testing to resolve issues?
Answer:
- Record the issue.
- Report the issues to higher-level meaning to escalate.
- Define the issue management process.
85. What is the function of the software testing tool Phantom?
Answer: Phantom is free testing software that is used to take control of Windows GUI. It can simulate mouse clicks and other GUI functions.
Advanced-Level Software Testing Interview Questions
86. Explain test deliverables.
Answer: Test deliverables are the documents, tools, and components that the testing team has to deliver during the testing phase. This includes before testing, during testing, and after testing.
87. What is the common risk that leads to project failure?
Answer: The common risks leading to project failure are:
- Limited human resources.
- Limited budget.
- Shortage of time.
- Improper or inadequate testing environment.
88. What is a test report? What are its benefits?
Answer: A typical test report contains:
- Project information
- Test objective
- Test Summary
- Errors
The benefits of a test report are:
- Communicating the project status and testing status to all.
- Making decision-making easy for stakeholders.
- The final report will indicate if the software can be released or not.
89. What is a test matrix?
Answer: A test matrix captures effort, quality, plan, time, and resources taken by each phase of testing.
90. What are the steps you would follow once you find the error?
Answer: Steps that we should follow after finding out an error are:
- Recreate the error.
- Take a screenshot of the error.
- Log the error.
91. Can you explain N+1 testing?
Answer: Software testers carry out N+1 testing in multiple cycles and repeat it many times with the aim to retest the errors found in the Nth cycle and fix them in the N+1th cycle. It continues until there are no more errors.
92. Mention the purpose behind doing end-to-end testing.
Answer: There are many reasons for doing end-to-end testing. These are:
- To complement functional testing.
- Test the whole application with external interfaces.
- To test the application with the database.
- For testing the application in a real environment.
93. What testing activities would you automate in a testing project?
Answer:
- Tests that use different data for the same actions.
- Tests that run for every build of the application.
- Adding automation is beneficial when pages do not change in a short time.
- In mission-critical pages.
- When we need to use the same tests for different browsers.
94. What is functional system testing?
Answer: Functional system testing checks the end-to-end functionality of the whole system.
95. Explain independent testing.
Answer: Independent testing refers to a collection of tests that a group of software testers performs run on a particular product and does not associate with the development team.
96. What is typically the most significant reason to use risk to drive testing efforts?
Answer: This is because it is not feasible to test everything.
97. What type of testing investigates the functions relating to the detection of threats such as viruses?
Answer: Security testing.
98. What can static analysis not find?
Answer: Memory leaks.
99. What are the experience-based testing techniques?
Answer: Experienced people can give better insights into the system by testing the application as they have prior experience and expert knowledge. Thus, the testing techniques where professionals use their experience for testing are called experience-based testing techniques.
100. What type of review requires formal entry and exit criteria, including metrics?
Answer: Inspection.
Conclusion
We hope these software testing interview questions and answers have made your testing concepts clear and made you appreciate the importance of testing and error-free quality product development.
Do you have already faced software testing interviews? Let us know the questions you encountered in your software testing interviews. We will add the best software testing interview questions to our list.
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