As a software engineer, you need to be familiar with testing. Though automated testing is helpful and catches many bugs, manual testing is essential to thorough quality assurance. If you are a trained software tester and are preparing for interviews as a manual tester, you should be prepared to answer all kinds of manual testing interview questions.
Below is our list of the top manual testing interview questions you can expect to get and should prepare to answer.
What Is a Manual Testing Interview?
A Manual testing interview is a kind of technical interview. Technical interviews are one of the final elements of any technical recruitment process. After checking your credentials and talking to you in a traditional behavioral interview, most technical recruiters will ask you to complete a technical interview.
This is your opportunity to flex your expertise and show recruiters you know what you’re doing. It’s one thing to have a credential from a bootcamp or university, but it’s another thing to be able to demonstrate you actually learned something.
A manual testing interview will focus on testing you on your software testing knowledge and your problem-solving skills. Your interviewer will want to make sure you can talk about the different kinds of manual testing processes out there. Better yet, you will need to demonstrate that you can easily explain and teach manual testing concepts.
Common Manual Testing Interview Questions
Sometimes the hardest interview questions are the most simple. Make sure you have really solid answers to these common interview questions about manual testing.
What Is Manual Testing?
It doesn’t get any more simple than that. You need to explain to the interviewer exactly what manual testing is and how it compares to other types of testing.
The basics of manual testing are making sure a system works the way it’s supposed to for a business or client. It is one of the two kinds of software testing, along with automated testing. Quality assurance testers test the software manually without using any kind of automated testing tools.
What Makes a Good Tester?
A good tester or test engineer is someone with very strong attention to detail. They should also have excellent project management and relationship management skills so they can implement the full lifecycle of a testing plan.
From having the skills to strategize and design the plan to having the managerial skills and tact to work with a testing team on evaluating exit criteria and reporting, a good test engineer needs both strong technical and social skills.
What Is the Difference Between Quality Control and Quality Assurance?
Quality control is about the product while quality assurance is about the process. What exactly does that mean? It means that if you are testing for quality control, you will likely be testing the product itself. If you’re testing for quality assurance, you will be focusing on testing whether your methods and processes are creating a quality product or service.
What Are the Main Testing Phases?
There are five main phases in your testing lifecycle: Planning and control, analysis and design, implementation and execution, and evaluating exit criteria and reporting.
Planning and Control
This is when you develop your test plan and develop your test scripts. This is where you define the depth, breadth, and scope of the project and decide on a testing strategy.
Analysis and Design
This is exactly what it sounds like. Once you have decided on a basic test plan, you will have to analyze ways to execute the plan and design the test processes.
Implementation and Execution
Based on what your test plan dictates and what your analysis and design suggests, it’s time to implement or put your manual test to work.
Evaluating Exit Criteria and Reporting
This is when the testing team gets together to evaluate the test data and testing criteria based on several factors. It’s also important to reflect on the whole process and share data and best practices for reporting purposes.
What Is a Test Plan?
A test plan is all about record-keeping. Without storing all of the relevant data for your test, you may not have a great handle on your results. It includes testing objectives, scope, environment, and information regarding the reasons for testing, as well as potential risks.
What Are the Four Levels of Manual Testing?
The four levels of manual testing are unit testing, integration testing, system testing, and user acceptance testing. You must know that these categories exist but it’s also important that you know what they are and that you can explain the relationship between them.
What Is Unit Testing?
Experts also call unit testing module testing or component testing. Unit testing involves testing individual units of a module at a time. It does not involve testing multiple units at a time, since it isn’t about checking how multiple units communicate with one another. It’s about how one unit is responding individually.
What Is Integration Testing?
Integration testing is all about figuring out how well two more units or modules are communicating and interacting with each other. Developers choose an integration testing strategy if they are trying to figure out which units or modules to combine and when they should do so. There are three integration testing methods:
- Big Bang Approach
- Top-Down Approach (Also known as Thread Testing)
- Bottom-Up Approach
What Is System Testing?
System testing, also known as end-to-end testing, is a bird-eye-view or big picture kind of testing. Rather than test individual modules or the way that two or more modules interact with each other, system testing is all about testing the entire process. There are many different kinds of system testing that testers use depending on their test plan and overall testing strategy.
System testing includes functional testing, regression testing, usability testing, recoverability testing, performance testing, scalability testing, load testing, stress testing, configuration testing, compatibility testing, requirements testing, and documentation testing.
What Is User Acceptance Testing (UAT)?
User acceptance testing, commonly referred to as UAT, is the final phase of manual testing. Testers implement and execute this kind of testing to decide if a product is ready for users.
UAT testers will run the product in question through very specific tests specifically to decide whether or not the product is ready to be released to users. UAT is different from systems testing because the tests are run specifically with the usability readiness question in mind. Meanwhile, systems testing is looking for bugs and glitches during system-wide testing in general.
What Is Smoke Testing?
Smoke testing is a subset of acceptance testing and is all about testing the new build of a product. It is a kind of testing that casts a wide net to include all major functionalities.
What Is Functional Testing?
Functional testing is yet another subset of manual testing, with its opposite being non-functional testing. Functional testing is exactly what it sounds like: it is a kind of testing that focuses on the software’s actual functionality. In functionality testing, testers check on every aspect of each function by providing input and testing the corresponding output.
Functionality testing can be done either through manual testing or automation.
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Meanwhile, non-functional testing is testing how a system should behave. Non-functional testing includes a few different kinds of testing categories:
- Performance
- Reliability
- Security
- Usability
What Is Performance Testing?
Performance testing is all about checking the scalability and speed of a particular software system. Some examples of performance testing include checking to see how long it takes for a client to retrieve information during high traffic times.
What Is an Exploratory Test?
An exploratory test is what you would perform for exploratory testing, a kind of spontaneous testing where the tester decides what to test as he or she goes. The tester typically lands on a period of time that they want to take to perform the testing.
In this way, testing design and execution go hand in hand and happen at the same time, rather than the more typical approach of designing the test before executing it.
What Is Regression Testing?
Testers should perform regression testing after the software has changed or after something about its environment has changed. The test is to make sure that there are no new defects or bugs in unchanged parts of the system as a result of changes made elsewhere. This is a really important testing process for general quality assurance.
What Is Sanity Testing?
Sanity testing is a subset of regression testing. In other words, testers use it to make sure there are no issues with a system after changes have been made. Sanity is an appropriate descriptor of this testing since it’s an approach that tests for logical errors.
If a sanity test does not go well, it will be because testers have identified some logical errors in the software.
What Is Ad Hoc Testing?
Ad hoc testing is essentially random testing. The tester tries to challenge or break the system by randomly testing different aspects of the system’s functionality. Because it is random and does not follow a testing plan or strategy, it is a kind of exploratory testing. Some testers will use a method known as error guessing, a software testing technique, to achieve their ad hoc testing goals.
What Are Some Major Advantages to Conducting Manual Testing?
Manual testing is necessary for situations when automation testing is not enough. If it takes you longer to write the automated test than it would to manually execute it, that’s a sign that you should not run that particular test as automated.
In this sense, manual testing is a better use of your human resources. Manual testing can also really come in handy when you are testing features that are in constant flux or that may be particularly volatile.
It’s also important to note a basic advantage of manual testing, which is that it is highly reliable when compared to automated testing. By testing manually, you can save time on writing an automated testing code because you are performing the test manually every time. Manual testing is also best early on in a project’s lifecycle.
What Are Some Major Drawbacks to Conducting Manual Testing?
Manual testing has its obvious drawbacks in that it is highly susceptible to human error. By conducting tests manually, you are exposing the program to the likelihood that you and your testing team is likely to make a few errors. This means that you will need to be particularly careful about checking your work so that those errors don’t affect your test results.
Manual testing can also be challenging because it doesn’t allow for much scope. Because it is so time-consuming and can be such a large undertaking, manual testing is more suited to smaller projects.
Can Automation Testing Completely Replace Manual Testing?
The short answer is no, definitely not. Despite all of the advancements in automation, there are some instances in which there is still no replacement for human labor. There are certain cases in which you simply cannot automate your software testing.
Automated and manual testing each have their own pros and cons. Manual testing is usually reserved for projects with a relatively limited scope. That said, manual testing can cast a wide net by testing multiple angles of an issue so that we can understand it more holistically.
Conclusion
Career Karma wants to make sure that new engineers, developers, and testers have the skills that they need to get a great job in their field.
That’s why we have put together some career readiness and job prep resources like this one to help you get started.
If you’re looking for a job in manual testing, you have to be prepared to nail your technical interview. We hope this is a helpful resource.
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