QA Interview Questions Mastery: Beginner to Expert in 30 Steps

Phase 1: Core QA Fundamentals (Steps 1–10)

1. Understand QA Basics 🔹 What is QA? Difference between QA & QC 🔹 SDLC, STLC, Agile Testing
2. Manual Testing Key Questions 🔹 What is a test case, test plan, test scenario? 🔹 Severity vs Priority
3. Bug Life Cycle 🔹 Explain defect states: New → Closed 🔹 Tools: JIRA, Bugzilla, etc.
4. Types of Testing 🔹 Functional, Smoke, Sanity, Regression 🔹 Black-box vs White-box
5. Test Case Writing Interview Questions 🔹 How to write test cases for common apps 🔹 E.g. ATM, Login Page, E-Commerce Cart
6. Boundary Value & Equivalence Partitioning 🔹 Common test design techniques 🔹 Questions around input ranges
7. Agile Methodology Interview Qs 🔹 Scrum vs Kanban 🔹 Role of QA in Agile team
8. Daily Stand-Up & Sprint Ceremonies 🔹 How do you report bugs in Agile? 🔹 Explain sprint retrospective/demo
9. Tools Knowledge 🔹 JIRA, TestRail, Zephyr – Basic familiarity 🔹 Interview Qs on test management
10. Basic SQL & DB Testing Qs 🔹 SELECT, WHERE, JOIN 🔹 Validate UI data with DB

Phase 2: Automation & API (Steps 11–20)

1. What is Automation Testing? 🔹 When to automate vs not 🔹 Benefits & Challenges
2. Selenium Basics Qs 🔹 What is WebDriver? 🔹 How do you locate elements?
3. XPath vs CSS Selectors 🔹 Dynamic elements 🔹 Interview tasks to write locators
4. TestNG/JUnit Concepts 🔹 Annotations, Assertions 🔹 Priority, Groups, Parallel execution
5. Page Object Model (POM) 🔹 What is POM? Why use it? 🔹 Real-time coding Qs
6. Common Selenium Errors 🔹 StaleElementException, NoSuchElement 🔹 How to handle waits?
7. API Testing Concepts 🔹 What is REST API? Status Codes 🔹 POST vs GET vs PUT vs DELETE
8. Postman Interview Questions 🔹 How to validate response 🔹 Use of Collections, Environments, Pre-request script
9. Automated API Testing (Rest Assured / requests) 🔹 Validate JSON/XML response 🔹 Authentication in API tests
10. Framework Questions 🔹 What frameworks have you used? 🔹 Explain folder structure, tools used (Maven, Jenkins, etc.)

Phase 3: Advanced & Scenario-Based (Steps 21–30)

1. CI/CD Tool Interview Qs 🔹 Jenkins setup 🔹 How tests are triggered on pipeline?
2. Git/GitHub Questions 🔹 Common Git commands 🔹 How to resolve merge conflicts?
3. Behavioral Questions 🔹 Tell me about a bug you missed 🔹 How do you handle deadline pressure?
4. Scenario-Based QA Questions 🔹 What if the build is unstable every day? 🔹 How do you handle conflicting priorities?
5. Estimation and Test Strategy 🔹 How do you estimate testing effort? 🔹 How to write a test strategy for a new project?
6. BDD Tools (Cucumber/Behave) 🔹 What is Gherkin syntax? 🔹 Integration with Selenium
7. Performance & Security Testing (Basic) 🔹 What is load testing? 🔹 Tools: JMeter, OWASP ZAP
8. Mobile Testing Interview Qs 🔹 What is Appium? 🔹 Challenges in mobile QA
9. Mock Interviews & Practice 🔹 Record answers for 20+ questions 🔹 Use tools like Pramp or Interviewing.io
10. Build Your QA Portfolio 🔹 Projects on GitHub 🔹 Postman collections, Selenium framework, API test repo 🔹 Be ready with STAR format answers

🔁 Weekly Practice Tips:

• 🔹 3 questions/day: Manual, API, Automation
• 🔹 Mock once/week with a friend or mentor
• 🔹 Write answers to common questions in a doc (your QA Bible)
• 🔹 Update GitHub with examples of your tests & projects