I have to take an interview of a QA Lead. Can anybody give me suggestion as to what kind of questions that will be asked apart from regular testing definitions and general questions like how to handle a team etc.? Are there any examples of really good questions? Please help.
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2You are looking for the exact questions or the areas/topics which you should target?– DhimanCommented Aug 19, 2015 at 17:48
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7 Answers
I read this one online and really liked it:
7) To what extent should developers do their own testing or do you believe testing is the responsibility of the QA team? from here
Your first focus is on whether they have the technical skills to perform the job in general. Your second focus should be on whether they'd be a good fit at your specific workplace. I'd want to know how they handle conflicting release schedules, who is ultimately responsible for a release, is it ever OK to go cowboy and give a shipit without testing, etc. Think about what kinds of conflicts have come up in YOUR company involving QA.
I think I'd want to take a step back from what questions, and figure out "what kind of information do I need?", before I figure out how to get it. I'd be asking myself questions like
- What responsibilities does this person have? Are they expected to give a ship/no ship decision, or just to inform it?
- What skills do they need in order to get that work done? How much coaching of others would they be expected to do?
- Who will they need to work with?
- How does the team currently work? Are they expected to change that?
- How much support are we able to give initially?
and so on. Johanna Rothman has a fantastic template for doing a job analysis. You can timebox it to half an hour, it doesn't have to take forever.
One important question: is this person actually a manager in all but name? Sometimes companies try to get someone cheap (though I actually don't agree that managers should always be paid more than team members). If this person is going to be a line manager, then there is one question that may be very revealing: "Have you ever had to fire anyone?" It may put people off taking your job, but at least candidates who aren't willing to admit that management is all about making hard decisions will filter themselves out.
My favorite is this one:
- I'll give you a software to test next Monday. You will have to finish test activities to release it on Friday
- I'll ask you next Wednesday how is your progress.
How would you manage to give me appropriate information?
I expect the person plan the activities with a test inventory, defines a coverage and provide metrics, a percentage of the progress according with the defined coverage criteria.
If s/he talks about prioritization, much better!
Hope it helps!
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Instead of "I'll test 50%" I would say "I've tested 50% according to my plan, according to certain coverage criteria", because it's a metric to report... you have to messure it and know how good or bad you are reaching it during the week. Commented Aug 22, 2015 at 11:35
If the QA Lead will have responsibility for a number of test engineers, I would ask questions around coaching and how this person would ensure that the test engineers are doing a great job and are developing in their roles.
Questions are depend on previous experience - 60% Q technical & 20% Q test process, 20% Q test reporting to manager level.
It varies from place to place depending on their culture.
Based on my experience, and the way I prefer to interview people for lead positions then the technical, process and managerial parts will take most of the interview time but the answers to them will not have a right or wrong answer, and will usually lead to a short discussion and followup questions.
You need to bear in mind that the interviewer is trying to understand how do you think, how do you solve problems or how smart are you and not how much knowledge you memorized over the years.
This means that for most of the questions any answer is accepted as long as you can justify it in the right context.
Follow my suggestion for the interview:
You have only one week for testing software A and software B created by two indipendent teams, after this week both software will be released. In the previous testing sessions the QA team has reported 9 bugs for software A and 3 for software B (same priority and severity). How will you arrange the time of the team for the remaining week?