QA Engineer interview questions and answers.

Questions

Technical questions to practise out loud

1. 01

   What is the difference between bug severity and priority?

   Severity measures technical and user impact; priority expresses business urgency and repair order. A severe edge-case bug may be lower priority than a moderate defect blocking today's major customer or release.

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2. 02

   How would you test an order creation API?

   Test the happy contract plus validation, authentication, authorization, totals, stock, idempotency, duplicates, concurrency, dependency failures, transaction rollback, status and error schemas, persistence, events, performance and audit effects.

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3. 03

   What makes a high-quality bug report?

   A strong bug report has a precise title, environment and build, minimal reproducible steps, expected and actual behavior, frequency and impact, evidence such as logs or video, relevant data, and no unsupported diagnosis.

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4. 04

   How do you use the test pyramid?

   Keep most checks fast and close to logic, fewer integration tests at real boundaries, and a small end-to-end layer for critical journeys. The exact shape follows risk, but feedback should remain fast and failures attributable.

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5. 05

   How do you prioritise testing by risk?

   Score features by likelihood of failure and impact on users, revenue, safety, compliance and recoverability; add change complexity and defect history, then spend depth and environments where residual risk is highest.

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6. 06

   How do you run exploratory testing?

   Run exploratory testing with a time-boxed charter, risk hypothesis, representative data and environment; vary inputs and sequences, record observations and coverage, capture reproducible defects, then debrief and update future checks.

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7. 07

   How do you maintain a regression suite?

   Keep tests that protect current high-risk behavior, remove duplicates and obsolete cases, assign ownership, classify failures, track runtime and flakiness, review after incidents and features, and balance each case at the cheapest reliable layer.

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8. 08

   How do you manage test data?

   Create minimal deterministic data through supported APIs or fixtures, isolate it per test and worker, avoid copied personal data, mask production-like samples, control clocks and identities, and clean up or use disposable environments.

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9. 09

   How do you define release criteria?

   Release criteria combine required functional checks, unresolved defect risk, security and compliance gates, performance and reliability thresholds, observability readiness, migration and rollback evidence, stakeholder acceptance and explicit exceptions.

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10. 10

    What quality metrics do you use?

    Use outcome and flow metrics such as escaped defects by impact, change failure rate, time to detect and recover, flaky-test rate, coverage of critical risks and customer failure rate; avoid raw test counts as quality.

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