40 questions / 10 random questions
Random questions, instant feedback, and review for missed questions.
What should be done first when creating a quality plan for a new service?
Answer: Identify and prioritize user, business, and technical quality risks
Quality work should be allocated according to risks, including impact and likelihood. Quality goals, scope, techniques, environments, and exit criteria follow from those priorities.
Why are unit, integration, system, and acceptance testing separated?
Answer: To vary scope and purpose and detect failures from components through business value
Each test level has a different target and purpose. Unit tests cover components, integration tests interfaces, system tests end-to-end behavior, and acceptance tests business and user needs.
Which test suite best follows the test pyramid?
Answer: Build a broad base of fast unit tests and focus integration and end-to-end tests on critical paths
A broad base of fast, diagnostic lower-level tests plus a focused set of slower integration and end-to-end tests balances speed, confidence, and maintainability.
An input accepts ages from 18 through 65. Which set represents equivalence partitions?
Answer: 17 or below, 18 through 65, and 66 or above
Equivalence partitioning divides inputs into valid and invalid classes expected to behave similarly, then samples each class. Boundary value analysis complements it at the edges.
A quantity field accepts 1 through 99. Which values best apply boundary value analysis?
Answer: 0, 1, 2, 98, 99, and 100
Boundary value analysis targets values just below, on, and just above each boundary, efficiently revealing comparison and off-by-one errors.
A discount rate depends on membership type, purchase amount, and coupon presence. Which technique is most suitable?
Answer: Decision table testing
A decision table maps combinations of conditions to outcomes, making missing, contradictory, and untested rules visible.
An order moves among received, paid, shipped, and canceled states, with different allowed actions in each state. Which technique fits best?
Answer: State transition testing
State transition testing checks current state, events, next state, and valid or invalid actions, including defects that occur only after specific sequences.
There are too many combinations of OS, browser, language, and role. Which technique covers interactions with fewer cases?
Answer: Use pairwise testing to cover every pair of factor values
Pairwise testing greatly reduces the suite while covering each pair of factor values at least once. High-risk combinations should still be added explicitly.
Which approach makes exploratory testing effective?
Answer: Set a charter and timebox, combine learning, design, and execution, and keep evidence
Exploratory testing is not aimless clicking. A charter, timebox, observations, findings, and remaining coverage make the work focused and explainable.
Which information is most important when prioritizing risk-based testing?
Answer: Likelihood of failure and impact on users and the business
Risk is commonly assessed from likelihood and impact. Change size, complexity, defect history, usage, financial, safety, and regulatory consequences inform priority.
What is the main benefit of traceability from requirements through test results?
Answer: It shows verification status per requirement and supports change impact analysis
Linking requirements, design, test conditions, cases, results, and defects exposes untested needs, supports regression selection, and provides release evidence.
Which characteristic describes good acceptance criteria?
Answer: Describe conditions, actions, and observable outcomes specifically and verifiably
Acceptance criteria create shared understanding and a test oracle. They should define observable behavior with examples or measures rather than vague adjectives.
A requirement review finds the phrase 'respond promptly.' What is the best action?
Answer: Clarify the operation, load, measurement interval, and acceptable response time
Ambiguous non-functional requirements become testable by defining the subject, conditions, metric, and threshold. Finding ambiguity in static review reduces rework.
Which information is most useful when reporting a hard-to-reproduce defect?
Answer: Environment, build, time, preconditions, steps, expected and actual results, logs, and correlation IDs
When reproducibility is low, execution context and evidence are critical. Timestamps and correlation IDs connect the report to distributed logs and traces.
Which statement correctly distinguishes defect severity from priority?
Answer: Severity reflects impact, while priority reflects repair urgency including business context
Severity describes failure impact; priority guides when to fix it. Release timing, workarounds, frequency, contracts, and business needs can make them differ.
The same class of production defect keeps recurring. Which quality assurance response is effective?
Answer: Analyze root causes and escape points, then improve reviews, design rules, and automated checks
Quality assurance goes beyond finding and fixing individual defects. It improves the process by asking why the defect was introduced and why earlier controls failed to detect it.
What is the best way to select regression tests after a change?
Answer: Analyze dependencies, data flow, user journeys, and defect history to select impacted and critical paths
Regression scope should consider contracts, shared data, configuration, and downstream consumers, not just changed lines. Fast broad automation can complement focused impact-based selection.
Immediately after deployment, the team needs a quick check that critical functions work at a basic level. Which test fits?
Answer: Smoke testing
Smoke testing quickly checks critical paths to determine whether a build or deployment is stable enough for deeper testing.
Which is the most reliable test oracle for determining expected results?
Answer: An expected result independently derived from requirements, business rules, standards, and agreed examples
Expected results should be independent of the implementation to avoid copying the same misunderstanding into the test. Complex behavior may use reference implementations, known examples, or properties.
Production-like personal data is needed in a test environment. What is the best approach?
Answer: Limit purpose, use synthetic data or irreversible anonymization and masking, and control access and retention
Test data still requires minimization, purpose limitation, access control, retention, and deletion. Prefer synthetic data preserving structure and distributions; justify any real-data use.
Which approach reduces defects missed because test and production environments differ?
Answer: Version infrastructure and containers as code, expose differences, and reproduce production-like conditions
Versioned environment definitions make OS, runtime, dependency, configuration, and service-contract differences visible and reproducible without copying production secrets.
What is the best first response to a test that fails intermittently in CI?
Answer: Capture logs, random seeds, timing, and environment, then isolate shared state, time dependencies, and async waits
Flaky tests erode trust and hide real regressions. Preserve evidence, reproduce the condition, and make tests deterministic through state-based waits, injected time, and isolated data.
Integration tests make one another fail when run in parallel. Which approach improves isolation?
Answer: Give each test unique data and namespaces and use cleanup or disposable environments
Tests should not depend on order or leftover state. Unique IDs, transactions, dedicated schemas, or disposable containers provide isolation depending on the target.
Why are unit tests with a mocked external payment API insufficient by themselves?
Answer: They can pass against an assumed contract while missing real schema, state, and error behavior differences
Mocks quickly test local behavior but can faithfully reproduce a wrong assumption. Contract tests, sandbox integration, and a small number of end-to-end tests cover the real boundary.
What is the main purpose of consumer-driven contract testing?
Answer: Capture consumer expectations as contracts and verify provider changes do not break them
Consumers publish the request and response expectations they rely on, and providers verify them in CI. The goal is early compatibility feedback for real usage.
Which locator strategy makes UI automation more maintainable?
Answer: Prefer user-facing semantics such as roles and labels, with stable data attributes as an explicit contract when needed
Locators based on user-facing semantics also exercise accessibility and resist structural changes. Stable data attributes are useful when semantic identification is insufficient.
What problem comes from frequent fixed five-second sleeps in async UI tests, and what is the better approach?
Answer: Too little wait fails and too much is slow; wait for the required element, state, or request condition
Fixed waits are sensitive to environment speed and create both delay and flakiness. Waiting for observable completion with a bounded timeout is faster and more deterministic.
How does property-based testing complement example-based tests?
Answer: Generate many inputs, verify invariants, and shrink failures toward a minimal counterexample
Generated cases explore boundaries and combinations people may not enumerate, while properties express invariants such as round trips, ordering, and ranges. Important examples remain useful.
What does mutation testing reveal?
Answer: Whether tests detect small injected changes in the source
If a test suite survives an intentionally changed operator or condition, it may execute the code without asserting behavior effectively. Equivalent mutants require interpretation.
Why does 100 percent code coverage not prove the absence of defects?
Answer: It shows execution but not assertion quality, missing requirements, combinations, or non-functional quality
Coverage is a useful indicator of unexecuted code. Weak assertions can execute every line, and behavior missing from both requirements and code cannot appear in coverage.
Which test checks whether response time and throughput meet targets at expected peak traffic?
Answer: Load testing
Load testing verifies performance objectives under expected normal and peak demand. Stress testing pushes beyond capacity to study degradation, failure, and recovery.
Average response time looks good, but a minority of users experience extreme delays. Which metric should be examined?
Answer: Examine percentiles such as p95 and p99 and their distributions by load condition
Averages can hide tail latency and distribution shape. Percentiles, histograms, error rate, and throughput should be correlated over time and load levels.
Which practice appropriately shifts security testing left?
Answer: Add threat analysis, secure code review, SAST, and dependency checks early in CI while retaining later dynamic tests
Early controls reduce remediation cost, but no single tool is sufficient. Design, code, dependencies, and runtime behavior require complementary techniques and safe secret injection.
Which combination is most appropriate for accessibility testing?
Answer: Combine automated and manual checks for keyboard use, focus order, names, roles, and contrast, and test with assistive technology when needed
Automation efficiently catches machine-detectable issues, but focus behavior, meaningful names, and screen-reader experience require manual evaluation.
Which observation approach is effective in usability testing?
Answer: Give representative users realistic tasks and observe behavior, comments, completion, and friction without leading them
Observe representative users performing realistic goals and collect completion, time, errors, comprehension, and satisfaction. Record interventions separately.
What is most important when testing failure recovery?
Answer: After fault injection, verify detection, failover, data integrity, recovery time, and return to normal operation
Recoverability should be tested end to end under realistic faults, including RTO, RPO, in-flight work, duplication or loss, and restoration of normal monitoring.
Which condition is appropriate for a release quality gate?
Answer: Review critical-risk results, open defects, performance and security criteria, residual risk, and approval
A quality gate uses agreed evidence by risk and an explicit residual-risk decision, not a single count. Exceptions need rationale, owner, mitigation, and expiry.
How should defect removal efficiency be used for improvement?
Answer: Track where defects are found, including escapes, and evaluate trends in prevention and earlier detection
Detection-stage trends can indicate whether reviews and tests find defects earlier. Normalize definitions, severity, size, and period, and combine metrics to avoid gaming.
Which use of metrics should be avoided in a quality dashboard?
Answer: Treat the number of executed test cases alone as quality itself
When activity volume becomes the goal, teams can inflate counts with low-value cases. Dashboards should support decisions through user outcomes, risk, detection strength, and stability.
Which approach safely releases a change that has passed pre-release testing?
Answer: Roll out gradually, monitor technical and user metrics with guardrails, and support pause or rollback on anomalies
Pre-release environments cannot reproduce every production data, load, and dependency condition. Canaries and feature flags limit exposure while guardrails compare errors, latency, and business outcomes.