50 Essential QA Automation Coding Interview Questions for HR

Assessing QA automation testers is a daunting task! And I am sure, as a technical recruiter, you can relate.

Keen to know why recruiters find it difficult to assess QA automation technical skills?

According to a survey, recruiters, while preparing for tester interview questions, mainly focus on tool-specific questions. Does that all an organization needs for the role? Acquiring tools’ expertise? No!

An ideal candidate fits in the entire framework of the job, having technical and non-technical skills such as communication, teamwork, behavior, and aptitude.

However, knowing what skills a candidate must possess is easy, but knowing how to assess these QA automation skills is challenging.

So, here’s a set of expert-built QA automation coding interview questions that can help you assess candidates in all proportions equally. Using our 50+ essential QA automation coding interview questions, you can understand the candidate’s technical abilities in test management tools, logic compartmentalization, programming and scripting languages, etc.

Top 20 QA automation coding interview questions

1. What are some common testing frameworks you have used in your automation experience?

2. Difference between unit testing and integration testing.

3. How do you handle dynamic content on a web page when writing test cases?

4. How do you handle exceptions and errors in your automated test scripts?

5. How do you integrate your automated tests with a continuous integration system?

6. What is the difference between a test plan and a test strategy?

7. Explain the Page Object Model (POM) and how it can be used in automation testing.

8. How do you ensure that your test scripts are maintainable and reusable?

9. How do you handle browser compatibility issues in your automation tests?

10. When does a tester prefer manual testing over automation testing?

11. Who is responsible for test automation among developers and the QA?

12. What are the different elements of Selenium?

13. What’s the use of Protractor?

14. What are some test library APs provided by the Robot Framework?

15. What are some common risks associated with automated testing?

16. What do you understand by CAPTCHA?

17. How can you automate the testing of CAPTCHA?

18. Name the environment supported by QTP?

19. What are some limitations of Selenium IDE?

20. What are some XPath Axes?

QA automation coding interview questions for experienced developer 

1. Elaborate your plan for automation testing of web applications.

2. How do you distinguish a good framework?

3. Describe the concept of browser automation.

4. Define Sikuli.

5. What is the difference between Sikuli and Selenium?

6. Can you tell the difference between open source, vendor, and in-house tools in automated testing?

7. On average, how many test cases can you automate per day?

8. Under what conditions can you not use automation testing for the Agile method?

9. Can you achieve 100% automation?

10. How would you measure the success of automation testing?

QA automation coding developer interview questions for freshers

1. Describe some tools for automating testing.

2. What are the steps involved in automation process?

3. What is a test script?

4. How would you select a good test automation tool?

5. What do you mean by modular testing framework?

6. Brief me on Selenium as per your understanding.

7. Can you conduct cross-browser testing?

8. Where can you maintain information like URL, login, and password?

9. Tell me some extensions and test assets of QTP.

10. What is Cucumber?

Behavioral questions for QA Developers

1. Would you be able to take disagreement from a colleague?

2. Can you work under tight deadlines when required?

3. Do you think setting personal goals is important in an organization?

4. Have you ever received negative feedback? If yes, what was it?

5. Tell me about a time when you were able to identify top priority KPIs for product quality assurance.

6. How would you handle a situation where you expect collaboration with another team member, and they act irresponsive?

7. Describe a situation where you felt challenged at the workplace. How did you go about it?

8. Describe the most technically complex project that you have worked on so far. Also, how was it challenging for you?

9. What values do you hold at a workplace?

10. How do you envision yourself progressing in your career?

Tips for interviewing QA automation coding developers

While conducting interviews for QA automation coding developers, the recruiters must fulfill the following points to get the best of the candidate. Here you go:

• Determine the job role and requirements: Determining the job role is crucial and the foremost of the recruitment strategy that can streamline the entire extensive hiring process. It clarifies job role expectations, assists in targeting the right audience, and onboards the suitable candidate.
• Prepare the right questions based on the skillset: Recruiters must prepare the QA automation interview questions by asking the right set of technical, non-technical, behavioral, and soft skill-based questions. For reference, you can use the above list of questions.
• Go through the candidate's resume beforehand: As much as a candidate is required to learn about the company before interviewing for a better impression, the recruiter must also review the candidate's resume. It will help you establish better interview questions regarding candidates' work experience, projects, achievements, etc. You can check out these resume screening tools for recruiters to optimize your hiring process.
• Excavate candidate's framework knowledge: Ask specific questions about QA automation, for instance, testing tools, their automation procedure, framework, and more. This will lead to excavating the candidate's genuine knowledge and work around QA automation.
• Culture fitment: Conducting a culture fitment round is a must. The recruiters must not hire anyone without determining their cultural fitment, as it can help the organization in the long term. The developer is going to work collaboratively with a lot of other employees, and it is crucial to ensure the new hire fits well within the team and maintains the dynamics of the organization.

Want to learn how incorporating the Skill Assessment tool can help?

Considering the high pace and advanced recruitment in the AI world, manual interview questions asking procedure is not enough to determine the candidate's true ability and knowledge. The growing need for efficient and effective hiring demands a lot more than mere question-asking rounds. And that's the exact cause of the whooping growth of the recruitment industry at a CAGR of 5%, making it a 334.2-billion-dollar market by 2027.

That's why iMocha, one of the most robust and comprehensive recruitment tools, introduces its QA automation test for quality hiring. iMocha's pre-employment QA automation tests assist candidates' technical skills and QA knowledge in real time. The assessments are then analyzed and graded using iMocha's automated AI-powered grading system, eliminating manual hiring time and effort to none.

Here's the list of iMocha's fully-fledged pre-made QA automation tests:

• QA Online Test (Automation)
• QA Beginner Test
• Automation Tester (QTP/UFT) Assessment
• TestComplete Automation Test

Although the tools offer some of the best pre-made assessments around QA automation, it is also flexible to custom the assessment per the job roles and requirements. The recruiters can explore iMocha's pre-employment test library for QA to customize the test here.

Moreover, in order to protect the integrity of candidates during the assessments, it offers various anti-cheating prevention tools, such as:

• Audio and Video Proctoring
• Plagiarism Detection
• Candidate ID verification
• Window Violations
• Randomization of test questions

Conclusion

Asking the right question to the right candidate is a tricky job. It requires someone knowledgeable to be able to assess the true skills and expertise of candidates. Moreover, the manual recruitment process is lengthy and bound to potential biases.

That's why recruitment tools have made hiring easier and more efficient than ever, allowing recruiters to make more data-backed hiring decisions instead of guesswork or voting across cross-functional team members. These tools can be seen in reducing cost-per-hire and time-to-hire significantly.

FAQs

Does QA automation require coding?

Yes, QA automation does require coding. As an automation tester, the candidate is expected to write coding scripts using programming languages such as Python, Java, Ruby, etc. To create, execute, and maintain automated tests.

Which language is best for QA automation?

There's no best QA automation language since it depends on the project's requirements. But here are some common ones:

• Java 
• Python
• JavaScript
• C#
• Ruby