Test Design Interview Question - How will you test a photo sharing app (like Instagram)

Question

The interview format for Software Engineers at FAANG (and similar companies that follow the same structure) comprise of a System Design Interview portion. From recent interview experience, I learnt that for SDET roles, they sometimes have a counterpart module where they ask the interviewee to design a test plan/ strategy for a similar system.

For example - what will be your test strategy to test a photo-sharing app (like Instagram)? Since the position is for SDET/ Test Automation Engineer - you are likely to provide your automation test strategy along with Exploratory Testing.

The initial question will be very abstract, and you are expected to drive the conversation to understand the requirements and then provide your best possible answer.

Are there any templates/ tutorials to help answer these types of questions, as I flunked this round completely. The feedback provided to me was - 'concerns about test coverage', even though my coding & behavioral rounds went fine.

Answer 1

If the feedback provided to you was 'concerns about test coverage', then you should focus more on thinking more about the test scenarios. You would be good in automation tools and scripting, but you could be lacking in creating test strategies.

Few strategies to test such social media apps would be like:

• Testing the Photo uploading composer module
• Testing the Negative scenarios while uploading the photo
• Testing while uploading multiple photos, with 2G / unstable network connection
• Testing the Backend stuff such as Like, Comment, Share
• Testing it in different OS'es of Mobile
• Load test it with subtle number of users
• Test the quality of the photo/video uploaded, check the size of the same

You can get more such testing tips and concerns in this website.

Answer 2

For such general questions, the interviewer is mainly looking for how much knowledge you have about the tools you have used and are you able to practically apply those or not. The questions is really generic, so you should probably start with requirement clarification.

Since the concern brought out was mainly on test coverage. I think the following are some areas which need to be covered for most of such questions.

* Functional
* Perf
* Scale
* Security
* Browser Compatibility
* Devices/Platforms
* Concurrency on the same host
* Network related (cloud etc)
* Internationalization
* Accessibility
* Error conditions
* Boundary conditions