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Tips & tricks to ace QA interviews

Posted on April 29, 2022 by supriya

Quality Assurance Engineers aim to help create quality products. The job description of a QA tester goes beyond finding bugs. It involves preventing defects, enabling fast development, and, most importantly, ensuring that the development process maintains quality standards and delivers results. That is why QA interview questions evaluate a QA engineer’s overall personality. To land a high-paying job, you must come across as a candidate who understands the job role and responsibilities and is eager to grow with the challenge.

Going through interviews is essential to gather the required expertise for further interviews. Still, we advise being prepared from the very beginning to avoid any unwanted surprises.

Here are the tips to ace your QA interview.

Clear knowledge of data structures, automation, and manual testing

Data structures are essential for software development. In automation testing, data structures are used for implementing user interface (UI) maps using dictionaries. Data structures you must be familiar with are lists, tuples, stacks, dictionaries, and queues.

The QA interview questions that test your fundamental grasp of data structures must be part of the preparation. Functional testing is an essential automation concept that you must know. It would help if you also understood the STLC (Software Test Life Cycle) in-depth used in manual testing.

Highlight experience with automation tools

Familiarity with the automation testing tools is essential. If you are well aware of the automated testing tools available, you can select the best ones to optimize the overall testing process, depending on the project.

Make sure to highlight your experience with automation tools you have used in the past. It will help interviewers gauge your value. 100% testing automation is rare, which is why a clever automation tester designs test cases that guarantee good test coverage. Explain how you choose the right automation testing tool for a project to achieve high ROI. Furthermore, you must know which tool can automate which test cases.

Selenium, Katalon Studio, SoapUI, WorkSoft, and Cucumber are some necessary automation tools. If asked about a tool you are not aware of, don’t panic. Let the interviewer know that you are looking for an opportunity to learn new tools and further improve your skills.

Knowledge of embedded domain testing and web domain testing

Testing is a vast domain, and regardless of its application, software must account for validity, performance, and scalability.

Suppose the position you are interviewing for is in the embedded testing domain. In that case, you should have a solid grasp of software unit testing, integration testing, system unit testing, system integration testing, and system validation testing.

Embedded software testing is challenging due to dependency on hardware and open-source software. It would help if you highlighted any test combinations you designed for embedded testing and what were the resulting scenarios.

Web testing is a more familiar domain. As digital transformation is rising, there is a demand for professionals who can effectively test web applications and websites for functionality, usability, security, compatibility, and performance. Functionality testing, usability testing, interface testing, compatibility testing, and database testing are essential concepts for web testing that you must be familiar with.

Master black box, white box, and gray box testing

The three most common testing techniques used in software testing are black box, white box, and gray box testing. You should know how each testing technique works. Rather than telling interviewers what skills you have in the context of the type of testing, help them see the larger picture. Explain what sort of test case you designed using which technique and why you chose it.

Assume you worked on an extensive cloud-based distributed SaaS application testing. Tell them how you utilized black box techniques such as equivalence partitioning and decision table testing to speed up the test case execution. Further, tell them how you accelerated the workflow testing for the application by implementing the branch coverage white box testing technique.

Don’t hold back when you have an opportunity to explain how you applied your skills in real-world testing.

Any personal manual and automation testing projects

If you worked on any individual project and devised a testing strategy that you think is relevant to the position you are interviewing for, do include it.

Here’s an example. I worked on a CRM for a small-scale vendor with four modules-login, customer dashboard, database, and inventory. I designed a gray box test case to test inventory and customer dashboard functionalities. For testing, I used Selenium, Jenkins, and SoapUI. Elaborate upon asking about bugs or errors that occurred.

Conclusion

If you consider the tips shared here, you can ace any QA interview and become a high-value candidate. Acquiring proper knowledge of the latest automation tools like Selenium and Cucumber and CI/CD tools like GitLab and Jenkins will set you apart from other candidates. Talent500 has a large community of pre-vetted QA engineers. Join us today to get hired by global companies.

Essential skills to be a QA engineer

Posted on April 29, 2022April 29, 2022 by supriya

Quality product development needs an intricate balance of skills, cooperation, leadership, and motivation. Within the testing team, QA engineers are responsible for designing test cases. Any application has three essential layers: the presentation, business, and database layers. A QA engineer’s role relates to both front-end and backend testing. They evaluate the presentation layer in front-end testing while business and database layers are part of backend testing.

We discussed with senior QA professionals to understand what hard and soft skills QA specialists should have in the future. This article will elaborate on our findings.

While QA engineers’ specific duties can be diverse depending on the project they are handling, there are some commonly required hard skills.

1. Maintaining the bug database

The primary role of a QA engineer is to track the development of a product in the context of bug fixes. QA testers must be able to maintain a bug database to know all the bug fixes and quality improvements for future reference.

When shipping a product, it is vital to consider existing bugs’ impact on the customers. A QA engineer can approve sending a product with bugs. In such a scenario, the professional should know the risks to ensure that they aren’t unmanageable.

2. Understanding the systems’ specifications

Each product has a specific system requirement. A QA engineer must match the systems involved in the development process with the actual use case system specifications. Understanding these specifications is important as it outlines the condition or capability the system must conform to. System specifications serve as a foundation for test plans and validate requirements for completeness and feasibility.

3. Familiarity with necessary tools for test management and bug tracking

Bug tracking is one of the core responsibilities of QA engineers. Knowledge of essential tools for bug tracking and test management is necessary. A desirable QA engineering candidate must be familiar with multiple bug tracking tools such as BugHerd, Marker.io, Zoho, Stryka, and Asana.

QA testers must also be familiar with test management tools such as Zephyr Sca, TestRail, Jira, and XQual. These tools track all testing activities, analyze data faster, and manage manuals and automation test cases.

4. Programming languages

For a QA engineer’s career progression, knowledge of specific programming languages is crucial. Automation is an integral part of QA testing. Companies prefer QA engineers who can perform UI (user interface) test automation using programming languages such as Python, Ruby, Java, and C#.

While technical skills are essential for the job, soft skills are required to communicate effectively. As a QA tester, it will be your responsibility to communicate issues and feedback between developers, clients, and other QA engineers.

The most important soft skills that can help QA testing professionals elevate their teams are:

Empathy

QA engineers work at the intersection of developers, clients, and companies. These professionals need to perceive a challenge from several viewpoints. Empathy is a trait of successful QA engineers as they can truly understand the aspects of the product that the client values the most.

Empathic QA testers try to understand the client’s priorities by asking the right questions. Once they gain the same perspective as the client, producing a successful end product becomes easier.

Attention to detail

The code that makes up a web application is the most important thing. A skilled QA engineer must go through hundreds of lines of code without losing focus to spot minor imperfections. Auditing the code and the system is necessary to create quality software.

Any QA engineer must be able to monitor and check defect-prone areas of a system to prevent bugs. Furthermore, they need to anticipate any flaws in the pipeline.

Communication skills

Communication is vital to being a proficient QA engineer. Effective communication is necessary as quality assurance involves liaising with clients, other QA engineers, and development teams.

An eligible QA tester must be able to express ideas and concepts in written and spoken communication. Additionally, they must be active listeners.

Diligence

Willingness to learn and evolve as a professional makes the best professionals. QA testers perform functions that require effort and studiousness to catch up with technology changes. Diligence is a soft skill that will help improve your hard skills and value as a professional. It will help if you keep learning to keep up with the trends and new practices in the QA domain.

Problem-solving skills

Every engineering discipline requires problem-solving skills. QA engineering is no different. Solving complex technical problems and software testing challenges is a routine task for QA engineers.

An ideal candidate must take an efficient approach to solve software development problems. QA engineer career progression depends on how efficiently you can solve technically intricate issues by designing unique solutions. We hope the list of skills will help you keep up with industry trends and become more proficient at your job.

Talent500 helps companies hire top QA engineers by connecting them with pre-vetted candidates. Join our community of QA testers to find career redefining opportunities.

How to communicate with dev team as a QA engineer

Posted on April 29, 2022April 29, 2022 by supriya

Within the product development cycle, every team plays a key role. The development team is responsible for delivering the code, and the QA team focuses on maintaining the product quality. Both teams have specific goals with different priorities. While the goal of developers and QA engineers is an issue-free product launch, their positions can result in differences.

As a QA engineer, you must understand how to convey your message across teams to avoid conflicts and disagreements.

The following strategies can work to improve communication with development teams.

1. Avoid conflict at all costs

Developers and testers are part of the same ecosystem. But unintentionally, while giving their best towards project success, both teams can be oblivious of others’ contributions. Undoubtedly, developers put their best to create functional software; bugs and errors still occur.

As a QA engineer, you should make it a point to bring humility in your communication. If a bug you report is taken as an ignorant, trivial, or malicious idea by the developer, you need to understand it’s strictly a personal opinion. Learn how to communicate elegantly without being dismissive of developers’ feedback. If they reject a bug you reported, follow up politely to understand their perspective.

2. Provide constructive feedback on defects

Reporting errors and shortcomings are part of the job of QA testers. It is essential to consider a constructive way to convey the defects rather than sharing destructive feedback. You need to develop productive communication skills.

One of the easiest ways to keep feedback vivacious is to avoid dark, judgmental, accusatory, subjective tones. You can accelerate communication with the development team by offering valuable feedback.

Whenever you provide feedback, make sure it is:

Issue-focused
Specific
Tactful
Action-oriented

Avoid including any statement outside the scope of these four criteria.

3. Provide visibility into your activities

Visibility improves collaboration and builds trust among teams. Developers and testers are no exception.

Do not just assume that the development team, clients, or any other entity know what you’re up to or what testing procedures and standards you are using. For smooth communication, review what features, modules, or functionality you’re planning to test with the development team or the developer.

Transparency is one of the essential communication skills that help build most collaborative teams. When you share your approach with developers, they can better troubleshoot the problems faster. You can widen the scope of testing by organizing bug-hunt days with members of the product management, design, support, and architect teams. With more eyes scrutinizing the product, the quality improves. Last, you can publish the takeaways you learned after discussion with clients to help developers understand the product’s end goals.

4. Be realistic without fail

Testing is only a means to an end, so don’t be unrealistic with the quality requirements of a product. Your goal as a QA engineer is to maintain product quality without impeding production.

Instead of creating endless test cases, focus on what is essential for the customers. Based on that requirement, build test cases. More often than not, the user story definition has redundant requirements. You should anticipate the critical user requirements and perform a test based on that.

For instance, the software might pass all functional tests and look great but still be hard for customers to use. You represent the end-user and share your understanding with developers to create products that deliver the best user experience.

5. Understand it’s human to make mistakes

Have you found a critical error? Where do you go from here?

Avoid being sarcastic or belittling. QA Testing exists because bugs occur during software development. Just as testers, developers work under deadlines and budget constraints. It is plausible for them to mess up at times; it’s only human.

Don’t be dismissive of the efforts of the development team. Your role as a QA engineer is to assist in rectifying the issues. Also, if you find a feature to be low quality, do not threaten to disapprove. By not approving a part, you alienate the developer and make the product deficient. There are several steps you can take to fix low quality.

You can constitute a team dedicated to improving quality.

You can release the feature in parts marked “alpha” or “beta” version. This will enable users to access the element with an understanding that it’s perhaps half-baked.

Bottomline

QA engineers are responsible for product quality, but their job is to facilitate the development team. The right approach to communicating with developers is a skill expected from competent QA professionals. Follow the tips shared here to improve your collaborative skills.
Talent500 can help you land the best QA engineer jobs. Expand your horizon and utilize your QA skills to help developers at fast-growing startups and Forbes500 companies create quality products. Join us today!

How to become a full-stack developer?

Posted on April 1, 2022April 5, 2022 by supriya

A full-stack developer is not the same as a typical developer who only possesses front-end or back-end technical skill sets. As a full-stack engineer, you must have a deep understanding of web architecture and proficiency in front-end and back-end technologies.

Full-stack developers need extensive expertise and a deep understanding of software development to succeed. Design and database administration skills, as well as programming language expertise, are among their strengths.

If you’re aspiring to become a full-stack developer, the steps are very straightforward, such as:

Learn the required coding languages

Each learner’s journey will be unique because of their prior knowledge and abilities. To become a developer from scratch, you will need specialized training and hands-on project experience. However, this can only occur when you have gained a specific set of technical talents.

Front-end technologies

HTML/CSS: These are the technologies that make up the web. HTML is a programming language for creating online pages. In contrast, CSS is a stylesheet language for customizing the look of web pages. Both are necessary for a full stack developer and are covered in all training, online or off.
JavaScript: To keep up with the language’s rapid evolution, a full-stack developer must have a solid foundation in JavaScript as well as knowledge of the language’s various libraries and frameworks. Full-stack JavaScript developers must know all of the language’s features to succeed.
ReactJS: Using ReactJS, you can develop user interfaces in JavaScript. A full-stack developer can easily construct reusable UI components using this tool.
Angular: JavaScript framework AngularJS is used to construct MVC-based web apps. A full-stack developer can divide the business logic, data, and presentation layers into three distinct layers.

Back-end technologies

You must know at least one back-end programming language to work in the IT industry. A web application’s back-end contains database operations, user validation, and logical operations performed on the server. If you want to be a full developer, you need other skills in web design, programming languages for the back end of the web, databases, and web architecture. REST and SOAP are also important.

PHP: PHP is a popular back-end programming language because it is free and open-source and can run on various operating systems, including Unix, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Python: Programmers and developers worldwide love Python because of its easy-to-understand syntax, wide range of libraries and frameworks, and extensive library catalog.
Java: Java is a computer language used for various tasks. It may be used to create web, desktop, and mobile applications. There are a wide variety of frameworks available for back-end development in Java.

You can begin to learn in a way that works for you

Self-learning courses

Self-guided courses are more flexible and less expensive, and in some instances, they are free! Some platforms may also offer additional resources like instructor support and a community of learners. The amount of assistance you receive is almost always proportional to the money you invest. Although such rationale should not prevent you from thoroughly investigating platforms before you enroll, it should serve as a reminder. Here are some of the courses:

A massive selection of full-stack web development courses can be found on Coursera, ranked by the number of stars given by students.
There are currently over 300,000 students who have enrolled in complete stack development courses on Udemy.
Learn to code from the comfort of your own home with the help of FreeCodeCamp.

Boot camps

Code boot camps are quick, high-intensity training sessions designed to teach you all you need to know to become a full-fledged programmer. An intensive boot camp will provide you with the skills you need to land a job. As well as the time to network with people in your desired field and build an impressive portfolio of coding work.

Start developing your portfolio

Create an excellent portfolio that showcases your hands-on experience and practical understanding. Apart from serving as a showcase while looking for work, this portfolio will assist you in creating basic pages and evaluating your performance. As full-stack design specialists, their projects must display a keen sense of aesthetics and in-depth technical understanding.

Take the first step in your job search

Job hunting might begin once you’ve put together a portfolio of two or more professional projects. Always plan ahead of time by defining your professional objectives and obtaining cover letter input, as well as customizing your CV for the specific opportunities you’re applying for. When choosing a career path, full-stack developers have many possibilities. If you have demonstrated excellent performance in a director-level position for several years, you may be well-positioned to pursue a CTO position.

If you are seeking for Full stack developer jobs that help you realize your full potential, you can make your job search more effective by joining Talent500. Talent500 uses a variety of community events, training programs, and other strategies to help bolster employee engagement. Using the platform, you can take charge of your career development and position yourself for worldwide success.

Conclusion

Full-stack development allows you to work on cutting-edge technology, explore creative solutions with advanced firms and gain valuable experience. In addition, the industry’s rapid expansion provides significant career opportunities and security for tech-savvy coders looking to create a name for themselves in the programming area. A full-stack developer‘s path may appear daunting at first glance. However, the process is sped up with practice.

7 Best Git Practices For Your Next Commit

Posted on October 1, 2020September 30, 2020 by supriya

Git is one of the most widely used modern control versions in the world. Developed in the year 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system Kernel, Git is a mature open source project that is being actively maintained by developers across the world.

Today, a large number of developers rely on Git for version control for their projects. These projects include both commercial and open source. But what is the real reason behind the success of Git? Apart from ease of operation, its the well-defined guidelines or best practices, which must not be skipped.

Checking in code is a crucial step in any version control system. In Git, this is known as Git commit. Besides testing, commit allows individual developers to contribute to an expansive and evolving codebase. But all commits are not the same, and bad check-ins lead to regression, delays and broken build, increasing the time to market. Below, we have listed some proven git commit best practices for higher quality check-ins that prevent delays.

1. Commit Early & Often

If you are new to Git, follow the principle of ‘commit early and often’ to keep track of your changes and streamline your code development process. So, each time you change something, commit – whether it is renaming a file or something even more mundane, don’t think but commit until it becomes second nature.

2. Use a Branching Strategy

The correct branching strategy is vital to streamline your commit process. Branching improves the productivity of your team and helps various groups to work in parallel. In general, short branches with limited changes improve traceability and expedite code reviews. Smaller branches help to minimize bad check-ins, while committing more frequently eliminates confusion and prevents merging. It is also a good idea to have check-ins for a single purpose to improve traceability and catch bugs easily. There are many branching strategies to choose from, but whatever you choose, you must inform your team to bring them on the same page.

3. Test Your Code Before You Commit

Committing half-baked code will not cause you much harm, even though it isn’t good practice. Therefore, if you ‘think’ a task is complete but not sure whether it is done – do not commit.

According to experts, you should only commit code when a logical component gets completed, and you are certain there are no side effects of implementing it. Especially if you are sharing code, it is your responsibility to make sure that it is well tested and completed in all aspects before committing to prevent problems for others. Also, if your reason to commit incomplete code is to create a clean working copy, we recommend that you try the Stash feature in Git instead, which is specifically meant for this purpose.

4. Write Good Commit Messages

Good commit messages are short, clear and easy to understand. Here are some tips to achieve this:

Always begin your message with a short summary of the changes you have made. This summary can be up to 50 characters for the sake of brevity.
Leave a blank line before proceeding to the main message body. Here, you can provide detailed answers to questions like the reason for making the change or differences from the previous implementation.
It is recommended to write your message in the present tense or imperative, and use consistent commands as generated in Git. So, always write ‘Fix Bug’ and not ‘Fixed Bug’ or ‘Fixes Bugs’.
All subsequent paragraphs must come after blank lines. You may even use bullet points (generally hyphens or asterisks) preceded by a single space.
Always use a hanging indent for starting a new paragraph.

5. Make Small, Single-Purpose Commits

As mentioned before, it is always best to commit small sections of code so that every member of the team can understand what work has been completed. Besides, if something goes awry, it is always easier to fix smaller check-ins to maintain a stable codebase. Also, if separate policies govern your projects or codes, it is an excellent idea to keep them in distinct code lines for proper source code management and better housekeeping.

6. Avoid Rewriting Master’s History

Ever wanted to go back in time and change the bad code you have committed? Well, Git gives you the actual superpower to do that. In Git, you can go back to earlier code and rebase different branches on other branches. You also have the option to delete commits, rename them, or put them all together in a single commit. As an individual developer, you can access even more features, but we suggest that you are cautious in case you are using a shared system or work with the team.

Remember, with great power comes more responsibility, and unless you are working solo, it is best not to rewrite code history. If your code is shared with a team, it is better to check out previous commits rather than altering them to save them for future reference.

Besides saving history, it is also a good practice to maintain traceability. Therefore, every time you check-in a change, make sure that you include all the affected files and unit tests. This is even more important when you work between branches. This practice not only makes your changes traceable but also ensures others can use your check-ins without breaking their builds.

7. Fix a Workflow

Git offers users multiple workflows to choose from, such as long-running branches, git-flow, merge or rebase, topic branches, etc. What you choose amongst these depends on numerous factors, including your project scope, development goals, and the personal preferences of your team. However, you must select a workflow before you begin work so that the entire team follows the same format. By omitting this step, you may find different developers in your team using different workflows, which may lead to confusion and chaos.

To conclude, we would like to mention that the information shared on Git commit best practices above is by no means exhaustive. However, these seven practices will certainly help you in building a strong foundation in Git, despite your skill level.

It goes without saying that you must continue learning and developing your own best practices to up your expertise further. If you are eyeing career growth, you may also list your profile on Talent500 to empower your job search and find a lucrative role with Fortune500 companies.

7 Tricky Interview Questions An Experienced Selenium Automation Tester Should Know

Posted on September 3, 2020September 4, 2020 by supriya

“The tools of the interviewer are his questions,” notes the Harvard Business Review, and through expert use of questions, an experienced interviewer sizes up an applicant’s skills, talents, and job suitability.

In case of a job opening for a Selenium Automation Tester, recruiters know that everything from the interview to your everyday job will be circumscribed by the sense of urgency. Contemporary interviews work with limited time and yet the HR team must pick someone who can deliver on a deadline, or else, app releases are at stake.

This is especially so for intermediate and senior-level Selenium testers. For entry-level or junior posts, recruiters may ask basic Selenium interview questions. However, when interviewing someone with 4 or more years of experience, interviewers are not only exhaustive, but also detailed in their approach. As a candidate, you are tested based on the breath of your knowledge as well as your experience in troubleshooting certain finer issues.

To help you prepare for a mid-career Selenium Automation Tester job, here are 7 tricky and nuanced interview questions with appropriate answers.

1. How to handle an Authentication Pop-up using Selenium WebDriver?

As IT is rapidly changing, likewise, applications must be more secure. So, many companies have their own proxy settings for applications. If you open their server in a browser, it will ask you to enter the credentials. Even Selenium needs to handle the same auth pop-up before accessing the server.

Here are 3 ways how you can do that.

– Via the URL

Here, one is passing the username and password via the URL.
The syntax is: http://username:password@URL
For example,

Username: rohit
Password: P@ssword
URL: www.myurl.com

String URL = “http://” + rohit + ”:” + P@ssword + “@” + www.myurl.com;
driver.get(URL);
Alert alert = driver.switchTo().alert();
alert.accept();

– Using AutoIT

Sample AutoIT script,

WinWaitActivate(“Authentication Required”,””)
Send(“rohit{TAB}P@ssword{ENTER}”)

The AutoIT script would be passed within the Java code

– With Alerts
One can handle auth pop-ups with alerts with,
driver.switchTo().alert();

//WebDriver Java Code for entering Username and Password

driver.findElement(By.id(“userID”)).sendKeys(“userName”);
driver.findElement(By.id(“password”)).sendKeys(“myPassword”);
driver.switchTo().alert().accept();
driver.switchTo().defaultContent();

In case passing by URL does not work, one can also obtain credentials by Chrome extensions and driver.

2. The Selenium script runs in Chrome but not in IE. What can be done?

HTML DOM rendering and CSSOM construction differs from one browser to the next. So, there may be multiple reasons for a script not working on IE. One can attempt to troubleshoot the problem by:

1. Using the updated Selenium IE Driver
2. Verifying that the IE driver and working environment are compatible
3. Configuring the IE driver with the setProperty method and by importing dependencies
4. Setting the same value for the ‘Enable Protected Mode’ option for all zones from the Security tab
5. Turning off the internet security settings in IE when running the script
6.Using CSS Selectors to minimise exceptions
7. Setting a registry entry
8. Avoiding declaring the driver instance as static for running scripts on browsers parallelly
9. Using the latest Selenium jars
10. Enabling Javascript on the IE browser
11. Using JavaScriptExecutor instead of native click when clicking elements

3. What is the difference between ChromeOptions and DesiredCapabilities?

ChromeOptions is a class that can be used to manipulate capabilities specific to ChromeDriver. For instance, you can disable Chrome extensions with:

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions()
options.addArgument(“disable-extensions”);
ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

DesiredCapabilities can also be used to manipulate a ChromeDriver session. To change individual web driver properties, DesiredCapabilities class provides key-value pairs.

But, ChromeOptions supports limited clients whereas DesiredCapabilities supports a vast number of clients. ChromeOptions is supported by Java and other languages. DesiredCapabilities is available in Java, but its use is deprecated. When working with a client library, like Selenium Ruby Client, the ChromeOption class will not be available and DesiredCapabilities will have to be used.

DesiredCapabilities are commonly used with Selenium Grid, for parallel execution of test cases on different browsers. However, one can use both DesiredCapabilities and ChromeOptions using merge:

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
options = new ChromeOptions();
options.merge(capabilities);
driver = new ChromeDriver(options);

4. Is it possible to do responsive web design testing using Selenium?

Responsive web design testing is important, since many users use smartphones or tabs, and not just laptops, to access applications. Manually testing the application across all the platforms would entail a cumbersome and time-consuming task, which could potentially delay releases. To automate RWD testing one can use the Galen Framework. This add-on runs in Selenium Grid and with it one can run parallel tests as well as have the tests run in a cloud.

For visual validations, one can do RWD testing with Ocular library. Similarly, WAVE Evaluator can be used for check compliance with accessibility standards automatically.

5. What is the need of database automation testing? Is it possible to perform database testing with Selenium?

Currently, the amount of data being generated and used is increasing by the day. Moreover, with advanced front ends, back ends need to be more robust and detailed. Databases play a major role in storing and sequencing data.

– Defect-free data processing
– ACID properties validation (ACID means Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability)
– Accurate storage and retrieval of values in and from the database
– Data integrity and proper data mapping
– Bugs that cannot be found in front-end testing are brought to light

Yes, it’s possible to do database testing with Selenium. First you need to make a connection between the server and the database. To do so you need a JDBC connection. JDBC is an SQL-based Java API that allows for connectivity between the Java programming language and various databases. With JDBC it is possible to connect with the database and execute queries. Once these two steps are done, one can process the results. Key components of JDBC are:

1. Driver manager
2. Driver
3. Connection

The syntax to connect with the database is:

DriverManager.getConnection(URL, “userid”, “password” )

Similarly, the code to load the JDBC driver is:

Class.forName(“com.mysql.jdbc.Driver”);

To send queries to the database one can use the Statement object. Similarly, to process the data one can use a getXXX() method.

6. Why are assertions important in Selenium? What are different types of assertions?

Assertions are important for validation. They clearly state whether or not a test case is behaving as expected. As a regression suite or sanity suite, for instance, runs for a long duration, it is not always possible to sit in front of the system and look at the execution. Assertions help testers mark test cases as passed or failed.

There are 2 types of assertions:

1. Soft assert
This type of assertion will just verify the condition and give the result, but it won’t abort the test case execution when the test case fails.

2. Hard Assert
This type of assertion checks for the expected result, and if the condition fails to match, it will abort execution and throw the “java.lang.AssertionError” exception.

The different types of hard assertions in Selenium are:

assertEquals()
assertNotEquals()
assertNull()
assertNotNull()
assertTrue()
assertFalse()

7. What is a data-driven framework? How does dataProvider help in data driven testing?

Data driven framework is a test automation framework in which the data feed for the test cases can take the form of databases, tables, or spreadsheets, as in the case of xlsx, xls, and csv files. With a single automation script, one can run tests for all the test data available in the files as the data sets are now separate from the test cases.

The @dataProvider annotation in TestNG, a testing framework, helps testers automate test cases and thereby achieve data-driven testing.

The annotation is:

@DataProvider(name= “searchProvider”)

The return type of the @dataProvider annotation is a 2D array. So, if the array is 3*4 objects, there will be 3 test cases, each having 4 parameters.

These 7 tricky and nuanced Selenium interview questions are sure to leave you wanting to delve deeper into core concepts and explore further the practical issues that may arise when testing. As you whet your appetite for more, have our dynamic skill assessment and machine learning algorithms vet your profile and pave the way for an automation tester job at a Fortune 500 company.

All you need to do is sign up with Talent500 today. You’ll then be the focus of companies looking for the top 10% of talent and have a way to match your skill sets to the best job openings!