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Automation Testing Interview QuestionsIf you’re looking for a career in web development, game development, software development, quality assurance, and any other tech-related field, there’s a chance you’ll need to know a thing or two about automation testing. You’ll need to know the hows and whats of load testing, browser automation tools like Selenium, and more.

You can use this guide as a handy reference for sample automation testing interview questions and answers, plus helpful resources like this formal course on software testing.

To access a website, a user sends a “request” to that website’s server, and the server sends back a response in the form of the website you want to access. To load test a website, quality assurance engineers and automation engineers just need to multiply the number of responses sent to simulate different traffic loads. The web server’s response to the influx of virtual users can then be measured. This is used to determine performance issues and server capacity.

Selenium is a suite of software testing and automation tools built for web applications. Using Selenium, software tests can be written in languages like Java, Perl,  Python, and more. The framework itself can be deployed on the three major operating systems: Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Not familiar with Selenium? If you’re pursuing a career in automation testing, you should be! Check out this Selenium course on web application testing for help.

Selenium can be used for load testing, regression testing, and functional testing of web applications.

Besides Selenium, there is Load Runner, Sahi, Silk Test, QTP,  Jmeter, WinRunner, etc.

Load tests, sanity tests, and regression tests are the sorts of tests a quality engineer would typically automate.

Manual software testing takes huge amounts of time and resources, both human and machine. It’s a potentially exhausting process that can end up costing more time and money for the company than if the process was simply automated, owing to employee fatigue and its consequences: inaccuracy, missed issues, lack of clarity.

Learn more about software testing with these sample interview questions.

No. Proper automation requires as little intervention from humans as possible, since the tools used are built to run tests once they’re setup. As convenient as this might be, it should not be a complete replacement for manual testing – only for repetitive tasks like load testing, where thousands of virtual users are required.  Engineers should not automate things like test scripts, if those scripts can only be expected to run occasionally, nor should they automate code reviews, or bug testing for new builds of software that might require human interaction to detect specific issues. Large-scale, repetitive tasks are better fit for automation.

Designing the tools and tests to run software through takes a lot of manual, human effort, though there are frameworks and tests ready made for engineers to use. Even with automated testing, human error is still a factor – tools can be buggy, inefficient, costly, and sometimes even technologically limited in what kinds of tests they can run on their own.

Want to know  more about software testing? Check out this software testing tutorial for an in-depth look  into the world of quality assurance, and the processes that go into it.

Open source tools are free to use frameworks and applications. Engineers build the tool, and have the source code available for free on the internet for other engineers to use. Vendor tools are developed by companies that come with licenses to use, and often cost money. Because they are developed by an outside source, technical support is often available for use. Example vendor tools include WinRunner, SilkTest, Rational Robot, QA Director, QTP, LR, QC, RFT, and RPT. An in-house tool is a tool that a company builds for their own use, rather than purchasing vendor tools or using open source tools.

In order to choose the proper automation testing tool, you must consider:

  • the scope of the project
  • the limitation of the tool
  • how much the tool costs
  • the tool’s usability and convenience
  • the testing environment
  • compatibility

Project management and good judgment are important skills in software testing and quality assurance positions. Check out this course on IT  project management to learn how to make good, effective decisions for your team.

Test automation scripting techniques include key and data driven techniques, shared, structured, and linear.

Check out this course on software testing basics for a more in-depth look at the fundamentals of quality engineering and automation.

The Selenium WebDriver is used for automating tests for websites.

The Selenium IDE is an add-on for Firefox that includes numerous features for quality assurance and engineers to record and play back browser-based actions, such as typing and mouse clicks. Some of these particular features are: debugging functions, record/playback ability, user add-on capability. Users can speed up and slow down executions with the use of a built-in slider. They can also use the Selenium IDE as a side-bar, or as a separate pop-up window.

The Selenium IDE lacks conditional statements, logging and reporting functionality, loops, database testing, and it can not handle exceptions or automatically re-run tests that have failed. It also can’t take screenshots. Another downside is that it’s Firefox only. If the Selenium IDE is used in the Firefox browser’s side-bar, then the quality engineer can’t use  it to record any actions undertaken by a user in a separate window.

  • HTML name
  • HTML id
  • CSS locators
  • XPath locators
  • .NET
  • Delphi
  • Web
  • Java (Core)
  • Java  (Advanced)
  • Windows Mobile
  • Oracle
  • SAP
  • WPF
  • Siebel
  • PeopleSoft
  • Flex
  • Silverlight
  • test batch runner .mtb
  • results .xml
  • test file .mts
  • recovery scenario .qrs
  • shared object repository .tsr
  • local object repository .mtr
  • function library .qfl

Windows only.

  1. Test object
  2. Functions
  3. Utility
  4. Comment
  5. Programming logic

For each object class that QTP identifies, it has a set of properties stored. These include mandatory properties, which is essentially a description of any given object, which checks if it’s a child or parent object as well. Next are the assistive properties, which QTP resorts  to only if the mandatory properties are insufficient at identifying the object. If all else fails, QTP resorts, finally, to its ordinal identifier.

For more software testing and automation testing interview help, check out this course on software testing basics. Looking for a job in QA? Start preparing for a career in testing with this software testing and quality assurance beginner’s training course. You might also want to prepare for an interview in quality assurance itself by taking a look at this guide. These fields overlap, so it’s important to know it all!

Page Last Updated: February 2020

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