What's in your Testers Tool Box?

The test interview is not only a test of interviewee specific knowledge, but an opportunity to knowledge exchange. As an interviewer I have to spend at least half an hour interviewing some potential Quality Assurance Engineer and I want to use these minutes wisely. For example, I like to interview testers about various tools they use during preparation and actual testing. Here are some wonderful tools I use in my day-to-day testing routine:

Firebug - extension for Mozilla Firefox browser allows the debugging, editing, and monitoring of any website's CSS, HTML, DOM, and JavaScript;

YSlow for Firebug - helps QA Tester to analyzes web page performance by examining all the components on the page and even gives suggestions on how to make it faster;

Web Developer toolbar for Mozilla Firefox - makes CSS, HTML and link validations right from your menu bar;

Selenium - a free software testing framework for web applications;

Windows Virtual PC - is a virtualization suite for Microsoft Windows operating systems, and an emulation suite for Mac OS X on PowerPC-based systems. Virtual PC allows you create separate virtual machines on your Windows desktop;

Cygwin - a Unix-like environment and command-line interface for Microsoft Windows;

OpenSTA - GUI-based web server benchmarking utility that can perform scripted HTTP and HTTPS heavy load tests with performance measurements;

WinSCP - an open source SFTP and FTP client for Microsoft Windows;

HttpWatch – an HTTP Viewer and HTTP Sniffer for IE and Firefox;

Do you use any other good tools?

What do you hate about testing?

Tester interview questions usually focused on positive results, like most obvious test interview question is what do you like about testing, but should it be the case. I believe asking reverse interview question would open the real mind of candidate for Test Engineer position and would perfectly describe the software development organization where Test Engineer works now.

The most hated term among all testers is “UI Automation” and the misunderstanding from management around “UI automation”, thinking it is the silver bullet to all software development problems. As result the company spends money on unproductive test automation software.

Next most hated issue would be the developers. Some developers know how to test, when to test and what to test, another just throw the code over the fence with issue so bad that a basic sanity test could have caught as blocking issue.

The testers do not like managers, because every time the customer raises a defect in shipped product the management would question the testing team why this defect was missed during the testing cycle and who missed the issue instead of doing the root cause analysis for the defect. Some managers continuously call Test Engineer as Quality Assurance Engineer while Quality Assurance is a process not a title and request the software application to be QA’s when the meant tested.

Of course test engineers hate themselves. There are testers who get comfortable with what they already know and stop pushing themselves to learn more, other testers doing the same manual tasks again and again, while basic automation should be applied and used.

Why do you want to leave your current job?

Here are some suggestions for answering this interview question. Try to put some positive spin in your answer. First of all it means that you shouldn’t say anything negative about your current position and people while being interviewed at new company or at least try a neutral mode. For example one interviewee could answer as "I have had it with working with QA Engineers who couldn't test a toaster and don't want to figure out how, a testing methodology that could be described as bedlam at best, a control freak manager who wont give anyone any responsibility and only asks about weekly status reports". Instead, the way smart QA Engineer might put it is more positive way like this "I've been working with my wonderful company to advance the state of testing. My management has reached a point where they are satisfied with the state of quality assurance team, while I am still striving to improve in the art of quality assurance. I feel that I can no longer add value at my present company and it is time for me to start a new life"

My personal answer may sound like - I'm not sure I want to leave my company, but in the same time your job posting interested me and I really would like to talk about the opportunity your company has available.