Software Testing Engineer

STLC (Software Testing Life Cycle) is a fundamental part of SDLC which is used to test software and ensure that the
quality standards are met. It generally involves both verification activities and validation activities. In this, different
activities are executed in a specific order throughout the software testing process. There are basically six different
phases in STLC. They are as follows :

1) Requirement Analysis
2) Test Planning
3) Test Case Development
4) Test Environment Setup
5) Test Execution
6) Test Cycle Closure

Agile testing is basically a software testing process that uses agile methodologies i.e., follow test-first design
paradigm. It evaluates the software from the customer's point of view. It does not require any development team to
complete coding for starting QA, instead of testing and coding can go hand in hand. Features are tested as they are
developed. Some of its advantages include :

1) Boosts the performance as it allows all the testers and developers to work together
2) Features are tested as they are developed
3) Ensure successful delivery of the high-grade product
4) Saves time and money
5) Flexible and highly adaptable to changes
6) Improves product quality and allows developers to release software as early as possible

A test automation framework makes it easy to perform automation testing for your software. Here are some
components of a test automation framework.

1) Test Data Management :
i) A big problem in automation testing is generating the test data. A good test automation framework makes it easy to
build test data for the application under test.


2) Testing Libraries :
i) Managing and running the automated tests is a crucial component of any automated testing strategy. A test
automation framework provides libraries that make test management easy.
ii) A good test automation framework provides support for unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests.


3) Testing Tools :
i) Includes any GUI or command-line tools that make it convenient for testers to run the set of tests repeatedly.
ii) It also consists of tools that enable testing the software under high load to conduct performance testing.

Here are some of the best practices a software development and the testing team should use to ensure quality
software.

1) Decide what to automate :
i) It’s not possible or practical to automate certain tests, such as usability, accessibility, exploratory testing, or non-
repetitive test cases that frequently change.


2) Assign test cases based on skill and experience :
i) When dividing test cases, take into account the skills and experience of the tester and the complexity and severity
of the feature under test.


3) Removing Uncertainty :
i) The whole goal of test automation is to have reliable, accurate, consistent tests that provide helpful feedback to the
tester. If the tests fail due to bugs in the test itself, or it’s giving false positives, then the ROI on test automation starts
decreasing.


4) Choosing the right frameworks and tools :
i) There are a lot of tools to perform automation testing. Picking the wrong tool for the test at hand will waste time and
provide false confidence to release software that may fail in production.


5) Keeping test records in a bug database :
i) Using a bug database is a best practice whether a team uses test automation or not.
ii) Whenever new bugs are found by the automation tool or by the te

It’s not possible to automate the testing of CAPTCHA. That is the goal behind any good CAPTCHA strategy. By
definition, a computer can’t automate it. If it could, then it’s not a good challenge that you can use in your application.

However, if you need to test an application that uses CAPTCHA, you have to work with the development team to
build a workaround or a back door that allows the automated test to bypass the CAPTCHA challenge. It’s important to
restrict this workaround only in the test environment and not release it to production.

In software, many errors occur near the edges of the range of the data values. For example, when the programmer
uses the greater-than operator (>) instead of the greater-than-or-equal-to (>=) operator, it causes the off-by-one
indexing error.

Typically, developers miss these boundary cases because they follow a happy path when developing and testing.
Boundary value analysis helps to discover the errors caused by extreme values. The tester chooses the test data at
and immediately above and below the boundaries of the input domain of the data.

For example, if an input field expects a string of 20 characters long, the tester tests it with strings of lengths 19, 20,
and 21.

Data flow testing is a type of structural testing that is used to analyze the flow of data in the program. In this, a
programmer can perform various tests on data values and variables. Using this testing, one can determine the
variables that are used at every stage of the program’s control flow. It helps us in the following ways : 

1) Eliminate or remove variables that are never used after being declared
2) Pinpoint variables that are used but never declared
3) Deallocate variable before it is used
4) Pinpoint variables that are defined multiple times before it is used

Test driver and test stub, both are types of test harness that are used to provide a simulation environment for testing
a module or component. They both are dummy modules specially created for test purposes.

Test stubs: Test stubs are used in a top-down testing approach and allow testing of the upper levels of the code when
the lower levels of the code are not developed yet. It is used as ‘called programs’ when subprograms are under
construction.

Test drivers: Test drivers are used in a bottom-up testing approach and allow testing of the lower levels of the code
when the upper levels of the code are not developed yet. It is used as ‘called programs’ when main programs are
under construction.

Selenium provides the following advantages, which make it an excellent automated testing framework :

1) It is free and open-source software with a large user base and supports providing community.

2) It has cross-browser compatibility and supports multiple browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet
Explorer, Edge, Opera, Safari, etc.

3) It supports multiple operating systems such as Windows, Linux, macOS, etc.

4) It facilitates the usage of multiple programming languages including Scala, Ruby, Python, PHP, Perl, Java, Groovy,
C#, etc.

5) It provides support for distributed testing as well.

The JUnits annotation linked with Selenium are :

1) @Before public void method() – It will perform the method () before each test, this method can prepare the test
2) @Test public void method() – Annotations @Test identifies that this method is a test method environment
3) @After public void method() - To execute a method before this annotation is used, test method must start with
test @Before

XPath, also defined as XML-Path (Extensible Markup Language Path), is a language used to query XML documents
and provide functionalities like locating elements in Selenium by iterating through each element in a webpage. In
XPath, data is stored in a key-value pair format similar to an HTML tag. It uses a single slash, i.e. ‘ / ’ for creating an
absolute path, and a double slash, i.e. ‘ // ’ for creating a relative path for an element to be located on a webpage.

Selenium is not a single tool or a framework. It is a suite of tools that work with each other or in isolation to provide
different types of automation testing. Here are the four major components of Selenium.

1) Selenium WebDriver
i) A collection of open-source APIs and browser-controlling code implementations that provide a concise and
straightforward programming interface.


2) Selenium Grid
i) It enables the tester to run multiple tests across different browsers, machines, and operating systems in parallel.


3) Selenium IDE
i) Stands for the Integrated Development Environment.
ii) It allows the tester to write, record, run and debug the test cases.

The language used for writing test scripts in Selenium IDE is called Selenese. It is a set of commands used to test
your web application or system. Selenium commands could be divided into 3 major categories :

1) Actions: These are the commands interacting directly with web applications.
2) Accessors: These are the commands which allow users to store values to a user-defined variable.
3) Assertions: They enable a comparison of the current state of the application with its expected state.

An annotation is a type of text that has been pre-defined and has a specified meaning. It tells the compiler/interpreter
what to do when the program runs. The annotations on Cucumber are as follows :

1) Given : It specifies the requirements for running the test.
Example : Given I have an account on Interviewbit.

2) When : It establishes the starting point for any test scenario.
Example : When I log in to Interviewbit.

3) Then : It contains the expected result of the test which is to be executed.
Example : Then registration should be successful.

4) And : Between any two statements, it gives the logical AND condition. AND can be combined with the GIVEN,
WHEN, and THEN statements.
Example : When I enter my account number AND CVV.

5) But : It denotes a logical OR relationship between two propositions. OR can be combined with the GIVEN, WHEN,
and THEN statements.
Example : Then I should be logged in BUT I must enter the OTP.

1) We may execute a single test from a set of tests in the Cucumber framework using the tags idea.

2) This is found in the TestRunner file's @CucumberOptions section. With the use of the @t keyword, we
may tag a scenario in the feature file.

3) A scenario can have one or more tags within the feature file. We can separate test scenarios with the
assistance of tagging.

4) We must pass the value within the tags argument to execute a selected test in
Cucumber, and we must pass the <~tagname> value within the tags parameter to exclude a test from running.

Cucumber is unconcerned about the names of your step definition files or the order in which you place them. Instead
of maintaining all steps in a single file, we can create steps.rb file for each major action/feature. This is referred to as
grouping.

There are majorly three steps in the working of BDD. They are as follows:-

1) Behaviour Description: We list down the features of our application first in the feature file.

2) Making the Step Definition file: The mapping between each step of the scenario defined in the feature file and a
code of the function to be executed is stored in the steps definition file.

3) Testing and running: We run the test cases to check if we pass. In general, a lot of failures are observed before
achieving the final code.

Tip 1 : The cross questioning can go intense some time, think before you speak.

Tip 2 : Be open minded and answer whatever you are thinking, in these rounds I feel it is important to have opinion.

Tip 3 : Context of questions can be switched, pay attention to the details. It is okay to ask questions in these round,
like what are the projects currently the company is investing, which team you are mentoring. How all is the work
environment etc.

Tip 4 : Since everybody in the interview panel is from tech background, here too you can expect some technical
questions. No coding in most of the cases but some discussions over the design can surely happen.

If you get this question, it's an opportunity to choose the most compelling information to share that is not obvious from
your resume.

Example :

Strength -> I believe that my greatest strength is the ability to solve problems quickly and efficiently, which makes me
unique from others.

Ability to handle Pressure -> I enjoy working under pressure because I believe it helps me grow and become more
efficient.


Tip : Emphasize why you were inspired to apply for the job. You can also explain that you are willing to invest a great
deal of energy if hired.

These are generally very open ended questions and are asked to test how quick wit a candidate is. So there is
nothing to worry about if you have a good command over your communication skills and you are able to propagate
your thoughts well to the interviewer.