2. Technical with two developers Scenario Question Set #1 Topic: Slow + Failing End-to-End Test Pipeline Imagine you inherit an automated CI pipeline that has become slow and unstable. Some tests fail locally, some fail in the cloud. Walk me through how you would investigate and troubleshoot this. What tools or commands would you use? How would you find the root cause? How do you decide which tests to keep, remove, or fix? How would you prevent this problem from happening again? If you fix the issue, how do you ensure it doesn’t happen again in the future? Scenario Question Set #2 Topic: High Number of Production Bugs Your team has many bugs coming from production and doesn’t know where to start with end-to-end tests. What strategy would you use to decide which tests to create first? How would you prioritize test development to reduce the biggest strain on the team? Where would you start if the team has no idea which parts of the system are most critical? Scenario Question Set #3 Topic: Building a Checkout Flow Test We added a new checkout flow (login → add items to cart → payment → confirmation). How would you design end-to-end tests for this new flow? How would you keep these tests stable as the UI frequently changes? How would you structure the test for maintainability? How would you decide what to automate first, considering limited time and resources? Scenario Question Set #4 Topic: Reporting & QA Metrics The dev team and business want visibility into test performance. How would you curate the information for them? What method or tooling would you use to make results visible? How would your reporting solution scale and evolve as the tests grow? What tooling have you used in the past for reporting test results? Cypress, Tech Stack & Framework Questions (These came later as follow-up questions) Do you have experience with Cypress? What do you think about choosing Cypress over other frameworks? How do you handle Cypress limitations (multiple tabs, API testing, localization)? What programming languages have you used with Cypress? What languages or tech stacks have you worked with in past automation projects? What do you think about React / React Native testing? Product / Architecture / Environment Questions Have you handled scenarios involving multiple devices (web, tablet, mobile)? Have you worked with microservices architecture? What challenges did you face? How do you deal with unstable test environments (warehouse Wi-Fi, on-site issues, etc.)? What challenges do you expect joining this team early on? What challenges do you think you may face long-term? 3. Behavioral with two managers General background & motivation Tell us a little bit about yourself. Have you had experience with SaaS products in the past? Have you worked with them? What do you like most about being a QA engineer? What’s your least favorite thing about doing QA? Testing approach & mindset How do you identify whether something is objectively broken – actually broken? How do you verify that? What do you think is the hardest part to get right when implementing a CI/CD pipeline that focuses on quality? Have you ever had challenges with how tests perform in the pipeline—for example, tests taking too long—and how did you handle making them more timely? What tools have you found most useful in managing and executing QA tests? (For automation, hybrid, and manual.) Process, agile & role of QA How do you see QA taking part in the Agile process? How is QA put to best use when you’re working in an Agile development workflow? Cypress, automation & their product How would you approach improving our Cypress test coverage for this cloud-native SaaS product? If you joined and we already had some Cypress tests, how could you help us improve our Cypress test coverage? What would your process be? Responsive design / web testing What kind of experience do you have with responsive design testing in a web application? Have you had to do that in the past? Do you have experience testing applications that follow responsive design? If so, what do you look for and how do you make sure they’re working properly across devices? Team structure & collaboration Tell me a little bit about the team structure that you’re on now or that you’re accustomed to being on. How many QA people are there and how many developers? What does your work look like in that setup? How do you feel about joining a team of six developers and no QA people? Metrics, KPIs & communication In your résumé, you mentioned building some KPIs at Capgemini. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What types of KPIs did you build? How do you communicate the quality of the team outside of the team? How do you tell stakeholders how the team is doing in terms of quality? Production issues / incidents Can you give me an example of a production defect that you encountered in production where you had to engage the team to solve the problem?
