QA Test Lead Interview Questions

Test Lead Interview Questions: Test lead interview questions are designed to evaluate the candidate’s experience, skills, and knowledge of managing a software testing team. Test lead positions are critical to the success of any software development project, as they are responsible for planning, coordinating, and executing the testing phase of the project.

Therefore, the interview questions for test lead positions are designed to assess the candidate’s ability to manage a team of testers, their technical skills and knowledge of testing methodologies, their communication and leadership skills, and their ability to solve problems and work collaboratively with other members of the development team. This way, the interview aims to identify the most qualified and suitable candidate for the test lead role.

Test Lead Interview Questions

Test lead interview questions can vary depending on the industry, company, and specific job requirements. However, some common questions that are often asked during the interview process for a test lead position may include the following:

• As a Test Manager, how do you divide your time into Various Tasks?
• How do you do test estimation of a story from a testing perspective? What are the different factors that you will consider during test estimation?
• What will be your approach when a customer reports 2 or 3 critical bugs after release?
• What would be your approach when it is 7 days since the client reports the bugs? How will you be able to restore the client’s confidence and make sure that these things won’t happen again in the future?
• What will be your approach if the client requirement is changing very frequently?
• What are the different factors/parameters you will consider when you review the test cases written by your team members?
• If your team member is not giving the output as expected then what will be your approach to handle this?
• What kind of work you have done in your organization and how you manage that?
• Which approach is best according to you TDD or BDD and Why?
• What is the process that you follow for deliveries? What is the path to production? After every sprint you go to production or any release cycle is there?
• What different sprint ceremonies do you guys perform?
• What different activities do you perform when sprint, starting ongoing and when finish?
• How is the planning for testing in a sprint?
• What will be your approach if the person who is working on the most critical task is not available for 1 week?
• Do you create any QA Plan during the sprint and what do you write under it?
• What would be your approach if the story is not delivered on time? What are the different steps you take?
• Have you created any site plans?
• How do you plan manual and automation testing in a Sprint?
• Do you do a manual test first and then automation or do both in ||ll?
• If the client requirement is that you need to do all automation in the same sprint then what would be your approach?
• Is it possible to test the story by automation only.? How we will work on it? What are the requirements to fill this thing?
• What kind of report that you share when you deliver?
• How do you share the performance of the QA team? What are the things that you add to this performance report?
• What are the different defect leakages that you faced till now?
• How do you do QA estimation for the new requirement? How do you calculate how much testing is required? What factors are there to set this?
• What experience do you have in managing a software testing team? Can you describe your previous roles and responsibilities as a test lead?
• What is your experience with test planning and test case management? Can you explain your process for developing test plans and executing test cases?
• How do you ensure testing activities align with project goals and timelines? Can you describe your approach to project management and coordination?
• What is your experience with testing methodologies such as Agile, Waterfall, and DevOps? Can you explain your understanding of these methodologies and how you have applied them in your previous roles?
• How do you handle conflicts within the testing team or between the testing team and other project stakeholders? Can you describe a situation where you had to resolve a conflict and how you approached it?
• How do you ensure the testing team can access the necessary resources and tools to perform their testing activities effectively? Can you describe your experience with test automation and test management tools?
• What is your experience with metrics and reporting? Can you explain how you track testing progress and report results to project stakeholders?
• How do you prioritize testing activities and allocate resources effectively? Can you describe a situation where you had to make difficult decisions about testing priorities or resource allocation?
• What is your experience with risk-based testing? Can you explain how you assess and prioritize risks during the testing phase?
• How do you ensure the testing team follows best practices and standards for testing? Can you describe your experience with test process improvement initiatives?
• What is your experience with test environment management? Can you explain how you ensure the testing environment is stable, secure, and reflective of the production environment?
• How do you measure the effectiveness of testing activities and continuously improve the testing process? Can you describe your experience with test metrics and process improvement initiatives?
• How do you manage stakeholder expectations and communicate testing results effectively? Can you describe your experience with stakeholder management and communication?
• What is your experience with managing distributed or remote testing teams? Can you describe your approach to managing geographically dispersed teams?
• How do you ensure testing activities comply with regulatory or industry standards? Can you describe your experience with compliance testing and regulatory requirements?
• Tell me about something you in short with Roles and Responsibilities?
• What is the maiximum size of the team you handled?
• What is test approach?
• What are all the test metrics you have used with example?
• How much you rate yourself in java?
• Have you created framework yourself ,If yes explain that?
• How do you move to particular windows ?
• How to upload files?
• What is Javascript executor and its uses ,where u have used in your framework?
• What are all the exceptions you know in selenium?
• Follow up questions will be based on your previous answers,I answered state element reference ,No such element etc
• How do u handled the exception?give 1 example?
• Find the duplicate element in an array
• Reverse a string without inbuild functions?
• Swap without third variable?
• What are all the agile ceremonies?
• What is velocity and burndown chat?
• What are all the HTTPS methods you know?

Sometimes when you are attending for the test lead position, you may face some technical questions also. Below, we will share some technical interview questions for the test lead.

Interview Questions for Test Lead

• Introduction
• Agile ceremony
• Write a program to find the occurrence of char
• Diff between tree map and hashmap
• Fetch the employee’s name and salary from the table in sorted order.
• Docker commands any 5
• Docker volume prune use of this command
• Docker volume ls command use
• Difference between Private Cloud vs. public cloud
• Distinct keyword in SQL
• Alternative of distinct
• What is Git’s head reset
• What is the Git flow for newly joined member
• Difference between string buffer and string and string builder
• Internal working of the TreeMap 
• Git revert command
• Git detach
• Write a program to get the power of any no with the logic of negative value added.
• They will also check your multi-tasking ability by asking questions when you are writing your logic for the program.
• Implicit wait and explicit wait
• Stale element reference exception
• How to handle drop-down
• Difference between list and set
• How to run Chrome in incognito mode through Selenium Webdriver
• How to convert Array into ArrayList
• What is interrupted testing in Mobile
• Which exception will we get if no element is found in the case of the driver.findElement and driver.findElements?
• Can the constructor be overloaded? Why can’t we override
• Difference between scenario and scenario outline
• Git and Jenkins commands
• POM.xml contains??
• Advantages of waterfall methodologies
• How to change the background color of the text in selenium and write code for it
• If you want to test a mobile app for New York and are sitting in Pune, How to test it & tell me the strategy
• How to fetch the data from the properties file
• How to connect to DB from JDBC
• Write code for taking screenshots in selenium.
• How to write Explicit wait in selenium
• Difference between getText() and getAttribute()
• Security testing test cases for the login page
• There are a few questions, like writing SQL queries for different joins
• Some Java programs like reverse string, Fibonacci series, Palindrome number, etc

QA Lead Interview Questions

• How will you validate the entire JSON response ( all values, let’s say 100) with the Database value? The interviewer was asked about the entire approach, like how you will store your JSON response and how you will verify with the database using Java.
• Let us say you have 1000 tests for regression, and 60% of test cases failed on the execution day. What will be your approach here? How will you know why these test cases failed? What will you answer to your manager?
• Tell me about different types of Java exception
• Tell me the test case status, pass or fail & which exception you will use.
  Scenario 1. In a try block, you provided the correct user ID and password and then catch block.
  Scenario 2. In the try block, you gave the correct user ID and wrong password and then catch block.
• How to schedule a Jenkins job for the different suites in a single AWS machine?
• How do you configure or import developer API code into Swagger?
• How will you convert an existing Java project into a Gradle project? What do you need to write inside the build.gradle file?
• Why do we use a singleton pattern in selenium?
• What is a class loader? Have you used it in your framework?
• What are the different types of HashMap?
• Why do we need the baseTest class in TestNG? Can we use @beforesuite and @aftersuite inside the test class? Which steps will you write in these annotations?
• How will you sequence your tests without using priority?
• One scenario-based question is where you need to verify whether the final ratings are coming as an average of all the ratings. Let us say there are 1000 ratings in ‘n’ number of pages. How will you automate this test case?

Conclusion:

The test lead interview process is important in hiring a qualified and capable test lead for a software development project. Based on the answers, relevant and insightful questions can help the interviewer assess the candidate’s ability to lead a team of testers and manage the testing phase of a software development project. In addition to technical knowledge, the interview questions for test lead positions may also evaluate the candidate’s soft skills, such as communication, leadership, and problem-solving abilities.

If you have any suggestions or questions about test lead interview questions, please feel free to ask in the comment section below. We are here to provide helpful and informative responses and would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Don’t hesitate to ask any questions or share any feedback you may have. Your input is valuable to us, and we appreciate your engagement!