How to Prepare for Software Testing Interview

The question that often arises in everyone’s mind is “Where should I start with for preparing for an interview after a gap?”

The answer to this question is explained in detail here. This tutorial will help freshers as well as working professionals who want to switch their current job.

By the end of this tutorial, you will get to know what you need to do while preparing for a Software Testing Interview, what specific skills you need to possess and how you should present yourself before the interviewer, etc in detail.

Come, let’s move on!

What Should You Know About Software Testing?

First Basic Thing – Testing Concepts: One needs to be very good at this especially the Manual Testing methodologies. However, knowing only the different testing concepts is just half work done. The next most important thing is to know what type/technique/concept of testing can be applied at which stage of SDLC.

“What should I test and when?” is very important. There might be some concepts, which do not apply to what we, professionals test in our company, but it’s always better to have an idea of all the testing practices.

Many freshers and working testing professionals might not have worked on various testing domains like Localization Testing, Time Zone Testing, etc.

But knowing more than what you have worked on will help you to answer the various questions from an interviewer in a better way.

Hence, always try to keep your testing knowledge updated in addition to your current project work. This will help you a lot while switching jobs.

What if an interviewer asks you a question on the topic, which you have never worked on? For example, if you don’t have any experience on web-based projects or Client-Server Testing and the interviewer asks you to test the “Yahoo mail application”, will you be able to answer this question still? Yes, you can.

Even if you have not worked on this type of project. How? Your curiosity to learn the things you never have done before will help you in this case. To broaden your thinking ability, be curious about each and every work & query you face in your daily work routine.

Knowing more is harmless and it will help you a lot to at least to give your thoughts on the questions asked by the interviewer.

If you don’t know any testing concept, for example, “Localization Testing”, then try to learn the concept first, like – what would be Localization Testing?

It’s simple: Test if the application looks local to you while using. Then go on exploring. Look for used colors, content, images, culture, etc, different countries, locales have it differently.

Consider a website that reads from right to left, is it accepted in countries other than the Middle East? Obviously NO. Or can you display the same geo-specific content in India that you can display in the US? Again, NO. This is just a simple example of how you can learn unknown testing concepts.

The very essential part of a test engineer is “Thinking out of the box”. If you are not capable of thinking out of the box, believe me, testing is not for you.

What do you mean by thinking out of the box? Don’t just follow the traditional methods. Implement new things in testing. Try to summarize and automate the routine testing work. Think from a user perspective. Think about how the user will use your application.

What are the common mistakes that he/she can make or which tasks he/she can perform on your application? This way you will get an insight into any application and it will also help to answer the questions in depth.

Besides from the “curiosity to learn” you should upgrade your skill in the following areas:

• Some hands-on basic Database/SQL queries and concepts.
• Any basic scripting language (for Automation Testing).
• Networking and system administration concepts will help you in system domain projects.

Don’t just write UI test cases,  you need to check what is happening inside the application. For applications that have a database connection, check for data updates & retrieval and in any case there should be no loss of data.

Get a hold on the project. Know the application under test before starting to test it. Instead of looking into the requirement document, look into the architecture doc, design doc, sequence diagram, and activity flow diagram.

Most importantly, you need to be perfect in what you have mentioned in your CV. All the questions the interviewer asks will be based on what you have specified in your CV. So do not mention the skills that you have not worked on, just for the sake of adding your CV with multiple skills.

The key point in the interview is, You must make the interviewer feel that it was a complex application you were testing and it had a lot of challenges in it for you as a tester!

One last thing – If you don’t know the answer to a question, say so. Don’t fool around and get into trouble.

We hope we have covered all the important pointers in this tutorial. If you still have any queries on “Preparation for a Testing interview” then comment it below.

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