Top 40 manual testing interview questions in 2022

In this article, we have collected and focused all our expertise to help you with the most useful questions and answers that will be helpful for you in a manual testing interview in 2022. Let’s get started!

1. What does the test strategy include?

This test strategy goal is to show customers all the activities and tools from the manual testing team for the project quality assurance. It should include the following points: 

• Resource;
• Scope and timetable for test activities;
• Testing tools;
• Testing priorities;
• Test plan; 
• Testing types.
  

2. What is the goal of ad-hoc testing?

Ad-hoc testing helps engineers to break the system without sticking to the pre-specified test cases. The goal is to find some issues that are not specified in requirements or test cases but could be faced by users in their critical path of usage.

3. What testing types are more important?

Here are the required testing types for having good quality and assure its maintenance:

• Unit testing;
• Integration testing;
• Systems testing;
• Functional testing;
• Non-functional testing;
• Regression testing;
• Sanity testing;
• Ad-Hoc testing;
• Smoke testing;
• Acceptance testing;
• Alpha testing;
• Beta Testing.

4. What is the difference between functional and non-functional testing?

Functional testing is more about the verification of functionalities' expected behavior. Commonly, functionality testing is about black-box testing. A tester doesn't need the code to check how functionalities are working. Non-functional testing is about checking non-functional items like performance, security, or usability of the application.

5. Have you had experience writing test cases without project requirements?

The interviewer asks this question to understand how you can handle the kind of projects without any requirements. So, the best answer for this question is to share options on how you handled it:

1. I tried to contact a Project manager/Product owner and ask questions about how this specific functionality should work.
2. The second option is to do refinement meetings to refine requirements together with the whole team. 
3. The third option is to ask for BA for requirements and give highlights on why it is important.
4. To implement Definitions of Ready for user stories before including tasks into the Sprint.

6. Can you please give examples where it is important to provide the Regression testing?

Here are the most important reasons why we should provide regression testing: 

• Bug fixes that could break working functionality; 
• Big updates in a system; 
• New functionalities;
• Extended testing before release.

7. What is Acceptance testing, and when should you provide it?

Acceptance testing evaluates if the application complies with the business requirements. Also, we use it to make sure the build is ready for presentation. As a rule, we provide acceptance testing at the end of a Sprint, just before delivering it to the customers. There is also the UAT (User Acceptance Testing) testing type. End-users or customers provide this type of manual testing to ensure that new functionalities meet the business requirements.

8. How important is it for QA to take part in development planning sessions?

The importance of planning for QA is that QA engineers can estimate and plan their tasks during the Sprint. They can extrapolate the risks related to old functionalities to the new ones. Give recommendations and plan the quality control by keeping in mind the new development plan. The most important thing here is the risk management based on picked user stories. It’s all about quality.

9. At what stage of the project should QA activities start?

The QA activities should start as early as possible. Ideally, it should accompany the development process from the very beginning. QA, here, helps avoid the risks connected to the quality. Thus, the team has more time to create a structured Test Plan and strategy to follow.

If QA activities start later, it can cost a lot of money to fix all the bugs. Besides, most users can stop using the application because of the inconsistent performance. 

Otherwise, you’ll need to postpone the release date to initiate an additional testing routine. Nevertheless, broken deadlines will also harm the product's reputation.

10. When is it required/recommended to automate the QA process?

Usually, you automate QA processes for a stable build. Additionally, you can use it to make manual QA work easier while regression testing needs to be done. 

How will automation help with regression testing? When QA deals with new functionality, you can run automated tests. It will help to make sure that the existing functionalities’ critical path works.

There are good practices that don’t allow the delivery of a build while all automated tests are not passed. Otherwise, the occurred issues should be fixed before delivery.

Automation is also good to run for a Production environment. To ensure that while users deal with software applications, there are no critical issues. If there are, the team will have the ability to fix them as soon as possible.

11. What is QA and QC? 

This is a confusing question for the QA engineers, but the most popular one during interviews. Let's start with quality assurance: QA specialists ensure quality for the product by process improvements, applying different approaches for the testing team and the whole team to improve the work and project quality.

Quality Control (QC) is about providing testing approaches to understand that the application meets all the requirements and has no critical issues.

In general, QA is a high-level activity that controls and applies everything to improve the software quality.

12. What must-have “Definition of Readies” would you add for a  project?

Definition of Ready should help a team to have finalized user stories with all crucial information and business requirements.

An example of common DoR could be the following:

• User story dependencies are defined;
• User story requirements defined;
• User story acceptance criteria are defined;
• User story can be divided into sub-tasks;
• The Sprint backlog is prioritized;
• The team has the same vision of new functionality.

13. What is the difference between Sanity testing and Smoke testing?

Mixing up the Sanity testing with Smoke testing is the common mistake testers make. 

First of all, I’d like to draw your attention to the fact that Sanity testing is a higher level of regression testing. The regression testing focuses only on details and has a deep dive into every functionality, whereas Sanity testing is focused on critical parts of functionalities. 

Sanity testing is the best option when there is no time for full regression testing.

14. Can you explain the difference between retesting and regression testing?

We make retesting to check if we’ve removed and fixed all the bugs from the software. In contrast, regression testing is about ensuring that every fix or update hasn't impacted working functionality negatively.

15. You have a two-week Sprint. Every two Sprints, the project goes to Production. How do you manage testing activities to assure quality?