Software testing is a process used during the software development life cycle to make sure the software is accurate and functions as intended. Every project for building software includes testing. In this article, I have included the most typical software testing interview questions.
This Software testing interview questions blog will guide you to understanding the concepts of software testing.
1) What is software testing, and why is it important?
Software testing is the process that evaluates the quality, performance, and functionality of a software application to make sure it fulfils the desired criteria. Software testing is essential because it promotes a great user experience, enhances programme reliability, and assists in finding defects.
2) What is functional testing according to your understanding?
Functional testing is a software testing technique used to validate the functionality of a system/application against the provided functional requirements or specifications.
Type of functional testing:
- Unit Testing
- Integration Testing
- System Testing
- Acceptance Testing
- Smoke Testing
3) What is non-functional testing?
Non-functional testing is performed to check the non-functional aspects of the system/app like performance, usability, scalability, security, and reliability. It is used to improve and enhance knowledge of the product behaviour and technologies in use.
Type of Non-functional testing:
- Performance Testing
- Security Testing
- Usability Testing
- Compatibility Testing
4) Are testing and debugging similar processes?
No, Testing is the process using which we find errors and bugs. Debugging is the process using which we correct the bugs that we found during the testing process. There is no need for design knowledge in the testing process while debugging can’t be done without proper design knowledge.
5) What are the Software Testing life cycle and its phases?
STLC can be defined as the sequence of tasks performed by the QA team to ensure product quality. Its phases can slightly vary from organization to organization. key steps are as follows:
- Requirement analysis/understanding
- Test planning
- Test case design and development
- Test environment setup
- Test execution
- Test cycle closure
6) Explain the difference between verification and validation in software testing.
Verification is the process that evaluates the software at different software development phases to make sure that it follows the requirements. It ensures that the product is developed correctly while Validation is the process to make sure that the final product meets the customer’s requirements. It ensures that the correct product has been built.
7) What is Agile Testing?
A testing practice that follows the rules and principles of agile. Unlike the Waterfall method, Agile testing can begin at the start of the project with continuous integration. It is a collaborative effort between testers, developers, product owners, and even customers. In Agile testing development and testing happens in parallel.
8) What is the difference between severity and priority?
Severity: The extent to which a defect affects the application under test. Different levels of severity – Critical >> Major >> Medium >> Minor >> Cosmetic.
Priority: The extent to which a defect affects the business. It defines how soon the bug is to be fixed in the main code so that it passes the basic requirement.Different levels – Critical >> High >> Medium >> Low
9) What is the test plan?
A test plan is a high-level document that explains test strategy, timelines, and available resources in detail. Typically a test plan serves as a blueprint for the testing process. A test plan generally contains the below-mentioned sections:-
Objective
Test strategy
Scope
Resources
Entry criteria
Exit criteria
Use cases
Deliverables
Risks and assumptions
10) What are the key challenges of software testing?
- Unavailability of Standard documents to understand the application.
- Lack of skilled testers, tools, and training.
- Re-execution efforts due to changing requirements.
- Unavailability of environment/test data
- Testers always work under stringent timelines.
- Planning test cases for other stages of testing like Regression, Release, and Performance testing
11) What is Black box testing?
Black box testing is a technique in which an application is tested without the knowledge of the code, the internal structure of the application, and implementation details. It is solely based on a Software requirement specification.
12) What is equivalence class partition(ECP)? What is its use?
ECP is a black box testing technique that is used to minimize the number of possible test cases to an optimum level while maintaining reasonable test coverage. Suppose there is a password field that can accept numerical 1-9. Let’s divide this into equivalence classes:
1) First class
Digits smaller than 1
(Invalid values)
2)Second class
digits 1-9
(valid values)
3) Third class
digits greater than 9
(invalid values)
So following ECP now we have to check only 3 values(3 test cases)
13) What is boundary value analysis (BVA)? What is its use?
BVA is a black box testing technique that is used to design test cases using boundary values. For example: If a particular field accepts the Values from 1 to 1000, then we test that field by entering only 1, 1000, 0, 1001, 999, and 2.
I.e. we check on the boundaries and then
Minimum-1, minimum +1, and maximum+1, maximum-1.
14) What is White Box Testing?
White box testing is a software testing technique that validates code, infrastructure, and integrations and provides feedback on bugs and vulnerabilities.
15) What is Grey box testing?
The grey box testing technique combines the white box and black box testing techniques. In this technique, testers have limited information on internal functionality and code but they do have complete information about the requirement and also have access to detailed design documents.
16) What is yellow box testing?
Yellow box testing referred to as warning message testing is related to the testing of warning messages in an application.
17) Explain the difference between positive testing and negative testing.
Positive Testing: The intention is to check if the system behaves as expected for valid input. Positive Testing proves that the application-under-test meets the requirements and specifications.
Negative Testing: This type of testing system is validated against invalid data. Negative testing intends to break the flow and analyze the stability of the application under test. In this testing expected behaviour is that the application shouldn’t crash but display a proper error message.
18) Can you explain the concept of test case prioritization?
Test case prioritization involves identifying and executing test cases in a specific order based on their importance. Prioritization ensures that critical functionalities and high-risk areas are thoroughly tested first. Factors to consider when prioritizing test cases include business impact, risk level, and customer requirements.
19) What is fallback testing?
fall-back testing is the “contingency plan for reverting to the old system or to an alternative emergency solution in the event of a failure of the new system during installation”.
20) What is Shift left testing?
Shift-left testing is the practice of transitioning to testing, quality, and performance evaluation early in the software development process, often when code is written.
21) What is the difference between smoke testing and sanity testing?
Smoke testing is a variant of regression testing that requires evaluating whether the software is stable enough for testing to continue. It focuses on executing a few critical tests to ensure the software’s basic functionality. Sanity testing, on the other hand, is a small and focused testing effort designed to confirm that any specific modifications or fixes applied to the product work as intended.
22) How we can ensure maximum test coverage?
We can use RTM to ensure maximum test coverage. The requirement traceability matrix is a document that co-relates any two baseline documents.TRM maps and traces user requirements with test cases.
23) What do you mean by Automated Testing?
Automated testing is a type of testing that is conducted without human intervention with the help of Automation tools. Examples of automated testing are Selenium web testing and Katalon Studio etc.
24) What is Volume Testing?
Volume testing also known as flood testing or scalability testing is a testing technique that is used to test the system under a significant volume of data. The testers test the system using large data sets, extensive file storage or heavy traffic to identify performance issues. Volume testing ensures that the system can handle the expected volume of data without compromising its performance or user experience.
25) Explain how you calculate ROI.
ROI(Return of investment)= Lifetime cost saved by automation – [Cost of developing automation framework + Lifetime cost of maintaining automation] + Lifetime cost of manual effort saved by automation
26) What is Defect density?
Defect density is one of the software testing metrics. Testing metrics are used to measure the quality of the project. The defect density of software is counted per thousand lines of code, which is also known as KLOC.
Defect Density = No of defects identified/Size27) How do you measure the cost of finding a defect?
Total effort can be calculated by considering total resources, the duration, and the billing rate.
Cost of finding a defect = Total effort (money) spent on testing / total defects found28) What is Root cause analysis?
When we detect failures, we try to track them back to their root cause, the real reason that they happened. This is known as root cause analysis.
29) What is the pesticide paradox in software testing?
If the same tests are repeated and again, eventually the same set of test cases will not find new bugs. To overcome this “pesticide paradox”, test cases should be regularly tested and modified, and new and different tests should be written to use different parts of the software or system.
30) How do you calculate DRE in your project?
Defect removal efficiency(DRE) = Number of defects resolved by the development team/ (Total number of defects at the moment of measurement)31) What is the Risk Register?
A risk register is a document used as a risk management tool to identify potential errors within a project.
The risk register includes Risk identification ID, description, category, priority, and ownership. Program managers or risk managers generally maintain it.
32) What are software testing principles?
Software testing has 7 fundamental principles
- 100 % testing is impossible.
- Testing indicates the presence of a defect.
- Early testing saves time and money.
- Testing is context-dependent.
- Defect clustering
- Pesticide paradox
- Absence of error fallacy
33) What is Testware?
A component of software known as “testware” includes the artefacts created throughout the test process to execute, plan, and design documents like expected results, scripts, databases, and inputs. It serves to explain the test items that are needed.
34) What is baseline testing?
Running a series of tests to gather performance data is known as baseline testing. It is to measure how well software performs in comparison to its prior version. The purpose of baseline testing is to enhance the application’s functionality and performance.
35) What is benchmark testing?
The process of evaluating software’s performance with respect to industry standards is known as benchmark testing. It helps in determining where the application stands in comparison to others.
36) What is a latent bug?
Low-priority bugs that are hidden or undocumented are known as latent bugs.
37) What are the entry and exit criteria?
Entry Criteria: To verify the readiness of the testing process. It involves test plans, test cases, use cases, Requirement specifications etc.
Exit Criteria: Exit criteria indicate the conditions to be met before the testing is completed. It includes a test summary report, metrics, defect analysis report etc.
38) What is defect cascading?
When one defect is caused by another defect, it is termed defect cascading.
39) Why are bugs present in software?
There can be several reasons why software or applications have bugs. Some of the reasons are listed below:
1)Complexity of the software.
2)Frequently changing requirements.
3)Missing requirements.
4)Coding errors.
5)Testing practices not followed.
6)Strict timelines.
40) What is usability testing?
Usability testing ensures how easily the end user can understand and use the application.
41) What is the difference between a Test Scenario and a Test Case?
Test scenario indicates what to be tested while test steps indicate how to be tested. Test case derived from test scenarios. The test scenario represents the end-to-end requirement to be tested while the test case comprises test steps, input data, and expected results for testing.
42) What is End-to-End Testing?
End-to-end testing indicates the process of testing a software system from beginning to end. This type of testing includes testing the software as well as all of its dependencies and integrations, such as databases, networks, file systems, and other external services. To Test desktop software, for example, the tester would install it as the user would, open it, use the application as intended, and evaluate the behaviour.
43) What is Ad-hoc Testing?
Ad-hoc testing is a type of software testing performed without formal test plans or test cases.
44) What is Compatibility Testing?
Compatibility testing evaluates a software application’s performance across different devices, operating systems, browsers, and network environments.
45) What is Recovery Testing?
Recovery testing is used to evaluate a software application’s ability to recover from crashes, hardware failures, or other disruptive events.
46) What is Alpha and Beta Testing?
Alpha testing is performed by a group of internal users before releasing the software to production. Beta testing is done by external users in a real environment before the software is released to the general public.
To know more posts related to interview questions visit here.