Automation QA Engineer: Interview Tips

Learn the basics, stand by your words, and get prepared. What else? Anton Klimkovich, who has been working at Exadel’s Quality Assurance department for 15+ years, knows the inner workings of technical interviews like no one else. If you’re preparing for an interview for an Automation QA Engineer position, let us help you with some useful tips.

What does an Automation QA Engineer do?

An Automation QA (Quality Assurance) Engineer is responsible for designing, creating, and executing automated tests to ensure the quality and functionality of software applications.

Their primary tasks include automating test scripts using programming languages and tools such as Selenium, JUnit, TestNG, or Python, running the tests and analyzing their results, and integrating automated tests into the CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipeline to ensure tests run automatically with each build. An Automation QA Engineer is crucial in improving software quality, reducing manual testing efforts, and accelerating the software release.

Basic recommendations

Knowledge and Skills

As automating Quality Assurance is impossible without knowledge of a specific programming language, be sure to know its basics. Any relevant online course on Coursera or Udemy should give you the necessary fundamentals. The certificate you’ll receive will take many questions off the table. It will be a huge benefit (especially for higher levels of QA positions) to practice your coding and train algorithm skills at Code Wars or on a similar platform. Some customers may decide to check your knowledge of algorithms, and practicing it wouldn’t go amiss.

What are the ISTQB requirements?

The ISTQB (International Software Testing Qualifications Board) is a global organization that provides standardized certification for software testers. The board offers structured certification paths with multiple levels, starting from Foundation Level, advancing to Advanced Level, and culminating in Expert Level. Each level covers different aspects and depths of software testing knowledge and skills.

Basic QA theory according to ISTQB requirements includes understanding the principles of software testing, different testing techniques, test management, and other related concepts. One important aspect is the knowledge of the software development lifecycle and how testing fits into each phase. Testers should also be familiar with different types of testing, such as functional testing, non-functional testing, and regression testing.

To learn more about basic QA theory according to ISTQB requirements, you can refer to the official ISTQB website. They provide study materials, sample exam questions, and other resources to help you prepare for certification exams.

CV and Interview

If you state something in your CV, be ready to back it up during the interview. Each of your statements should be supported by a good example and a clear explanation of what you can do. Don’t list all the technologies from your previous projects; mention only those you personally used. For example, if we see that a candidate mentions AWS in their CV, we will definitely ask exactly which products, and how they were used for testing purposes. So, add to your CV only the skills you are confident in.

During your preparations, brush up on your English. We usually choose one of the topics, UI or API automation testing, for example, and switch to English for further discussion. To get more skills related vocabulary, it’s best to review the certification syllabuses and materials.

And do not underestimate the skill to know how to look for the necessary information. One can never know everything, but the skill to google fast and word a search request properly will always solve your problems or at least lead you on the right path.

Requirements for Middle AQA Engineers

In addition to the above-mentioned topics, we will ask candidates about version control, their ability to work with Git and some simple commands. We will also ask questions about API testing and ordinary integration testing. A candidate should know REST architecture, understand how to test it, and be able to say which basic positive and negative tests there are for each request type.

Be ready to answer some questions about processing data that are returned or sent and how to organize the process depending on the language type. For instance, a candidate should understand what JSON Schema is, how to compare and verify it, which instruments exist for these purposes, how to process JSON requests, and what to do with them. At this level, we usually check the candidate’s knowledge of UI testing and ask how a minimal structure for parallel runs is organized for different browsers.

A candidate should be able to configure instruments such as Jenkins and Bamboo and have experience with Docker containers. We expect that a specialist at this level should know about performance testing. It’s always a huge advantage. If a candidate uses at least one tool to organize performance testing, he/she will easily create similar things using other tools. The most important thing is to understand what bottlenecks can occur, how to report them, and how to discuss them with a client.

If a candidate mentions any experience with frameworks, we’ll be sure to ask some subtle questions to assess their depth of understanding on this topic. Don’t refer to your team’s expertise. Speak only about your personal background and skills.

Requirements for Senior AQA Engineers

A candidate with 5 years of experience can usually do lots of stuff. We’ll ask broader questions about how to organize UI tests, component tests, end-to-end tests, and functional tests. We require an understanding of the tests’ ratio and the ability to structure them properly. It’s good to know basic programming patterns and be able to set up the infrastructure.

A candidate should have a basic understanding of how to build CI/CD pipelines with such popular systems as Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions. It’s cool if you can show off a small pet-project with an example of such a configuration. The ability to organize testing processes using service mocking is worth having too.

We always ask how exactly tests are written, and how to prepare preconditions for tests. It’s not enough for a Senior to write, for instance, generic end-to-end tests. But if he can structure them properly, highlight, prioritize, and distinguish functional tests from end-to-end ones, it does confirm a decent level. A person who strives for ideal processes and can organize integration testing, will be able to explain the essence of contract testing and demonstrate a SandBox with examples of their work.

The last point is a “must have” for such a level. A Senior should also know how to work with containers, how to create and launch them, and how to work with databases. If you mentioned experience with SQL we may ask you to write a relatively complicated request. We can provide a case study and ask a candidate to come up with solutions. On top of that, a good Senior doesn’t only possess in-depth knowledge, but is enthusiastic about learning something new.

Requirements for Lead AQA Engineers

In addition to all the topics covered above, a Lead AQA Engineer should be ready to describe his ideal flow: stages, quality gates, and which tests should be launched at each stage. A specialist at this level should have his own opinion and vision. It’s important to understand existing testing approaches: TDD, BDD, keyword-driven, data-driven, etc., and be able to choose the most appropriate one for a given project. We usually ask how a candidate would organize mutual work with the manual QA team on the project and the development team.

We hope this detailed overview will help you pass your AQA interview with flying colors and land the position you are striving for. So, get your GitHub SandBox ready and apply!