JAVA INTERVIEW QUESTIONS 1-) BEHAVIORAL QUESTIONS
1. Tell me about yourself?
First of all, I would like to thank you for giving me this opportunity and I really appreciate for your time. My name is Alper Aslan but mostly known as Albert. • I have been in IT industry for more than 6 years and I am currently an SDET on my team. • After working in different types of industry; o I have gained domain knowledge in Education and Financial industries. o I certified Scrum master and Oracle Java Programmer. o I have a strong understanding of SDLC, and I am familiar with both Waterfall and Agile environment o I am highly proficient in various testing types, including like; functional, regression and smoke testing. • I started off as a manual tester and eventually became proficient in automation testing o I develop Automation framework from scratch. I have successfully designed and developed many "many" tests scripts by using Data driven, Behavior driven and Hybrid Frameworks. o I am good at core java, Selenium webdriver, Maven, Cucumber, JUnit, TestNG, Jenkins and many more tools for test automation. Mostly I prefer opensource tools. o I have used o JENKINS for continuous integration, and SELENIUM GRID for multiple tests across different browsers, operating systems, and machines in parallel o ComindWork for project management and bug tracking but I also experienced JIRA in my previous projects. o and SQL for back-end testing o I have worked on API testing on my project and I used Restful, postman, and Rest Assured library o I developed my latest"testing framework" based on the POM which supports BDD. o Also, my framework supports Database testing using JDBC. These days I am learning and trying JOOQ. It is like writing real SQL queries. I don't know if you know it, but it is amazing. • As far as soft skill concerned, I consider myself; o A positive person, cross-functional team member o Quick learner and adaptable to changing circumstances and detail oriented. o as Steve Jobs said, "no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people" and sir/madam believe me I am a great team player. I am a people person. o I can also work well individually in a team o I always make sure that I meet the deadline (if you'd like me to elaborate on any of that, I'd be happy to go further into detail.?) • That is pretty much about me. Thank you.
13.! How do you prioritize your workload?!
• "Time to time we have multiple conflicting priorities where it can be difficult to know what is most important and urgent. I work out an important/urgent scale for rating tasks so that it is clear what takes the highest priority. Sometimes I get help from our team lead or PO for rating. • If something is both important and urgent, it gets highest priority. Important but not urgent is next and urgent but not important is next, then not important and not urgent is last. • If I need to get in details, I follow up following steps; o Collect a list of all my tasks and make a to-do list o Identify URGENT vs IMPORTANT à Most of the tasks are important but only some of them are time-sensitive. o Assess value à Estimate the time, effort and resources needed for each task o Know when to cut à Mostly can't get to everything on my list. After I prioritize my tasks and look at my estimates, I cut the remaining tasks from my list and focus on the priorities that I must and can complete for the day. Then I take a deep breath, dive in and be ready for everything. J
8. Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?
• "Well I'm really excited by this position at (COMPANY NAME) because in five years, I'd like to be seen as someone with deep expertise in testing, and I know that's something that I'll have an opportunity to do here. I'm also really excited to take on more managerial responsibilities in the next few years and potentially even take the lead on some projects. I've been lucky enough to work with some amazing managers, and so developing into a great manager myself is something I'm really excited about." • I am looking for a role with a company that I grow with and continue to take new challenges over the next five years. And beyond, I am not do hang up on titles, but I know I want to take more management responsibility. And ultimately step on to leadership position. IF THE COMPANY IS WELLKNOWN • "I am driven to be the best at what I do, and I want to work somewhere where I'll have opportunities to develop my skills, take on interesting projects, and work with people I can really learn from. Some of the most innovative thinkers in the industry work here and that's a big reason why I would love to build a career here."
7. Why did you apply for this position?
• After looking at the job description, I think it matches my day-to-day activity and my experience. • I was confident with the job description that's why I applied. • Also, I have done some research on the company and I am really excited about the company's product and services like... On the phone interviews we had before I got quite more information about the company's culture. It is amazing I would be very happy to be a part of this culture (company).
18. If you get hired, how long are you planning to stay?
• As long as there is a project to work, I am willing to stay as long as possible. I love to work long term with my companies. So that, I would be a piece of the success. If you check my resume, I have worked in two companies for the last 10 years.
22. Why should we hire you?
• First of all, I've done thorough research into this position and have read your job description and combined with the information you have so helpfully provided me during this interview, I can CONFIDENTLY say that I'm well qualified for this position. Meaning, I have all the technical and non-technical expertise, as required and preferred in the job description to not only succeed in this position but also to thrive. • Steve J. said, "no matter how smart you are, you need a team of great people" and believe me I am a great team player. • However, this to me is the basic requirement, and I truly believe that I'm the best qualified and will exceed expectations beyond just what I have noted, because I have crucial soft skills that can't always be quantified and measured. And I believe, that at the end of the day, regardless of job description or what we do, it's the personality of your employees that really matters. In this, I am unique and stand out because I learned the value of soft skills many years ago and I have extensive experience in honing those skills. • I always bring new techniques and tools that help to jump forward to the company that I worked for. • Many people can train in any technical skill within a short time frame, but training someone to communicate can be incredibly difficult. I have such skills in abundance: I'm an excellent communicator, extremely motivated AND motivating, and above all, I am the very definition of a problem solver. Whatever it is that needs to be done to accomplish my job and more, I WILL DO IT. • I think you should hire the candidate that has the best qualifications for this position. • Since I don't know the other candidates, I can represent only myself. • I think my experience and technical expertise will bring a lot of values and benefits to the company and the project. I think that's why you should hire me.
10. What are your strengths?
• I am a very detail-oriented person. I can prioritize my job according the deadline. • I am also very much dedicated person towards my job. • I am also honest person and I have the skills and expertise in QA process. • One of my greatest strengths is that I have a graphing skill I mean For example; when I saw or heard a paragraph, event, case or even if a sentence, I can easily graph it in my mind and implement it in a real life. • I am really good at presentations. When I present an issue or any topics, I make it very clear and to-do point way. Let me give you an example; In my previous company, we had a review meeting and there was 3 team member, upper management asked us every team has present their opinion. We separate our responsibilities and we are ready to tell one by one, but unfortunately every team member got the meeting concept wrong because the requirements are not clear and we realized that the upper management was waiting us a presentation and one of the team member presents our project and after the first team starts to presenttheir review, everyone looked each other and I feel that the team are little nervous and - We had a group for this review on slack and I wrote them don't worry about that I have a plan. - I just focus on the subject and prepare a template and send the team members and they prepared their parts and I combined all, then we are ready within 20 minutes and then I present all easily. So, my strength helps to organize the team and solve our problem and all the team members were happy for that because we finished and present it very successfully... We were team and I believe that if you worked with a team with passion, anything can be achieved, and we can reach the expected result on time which means the customer satisfaction, and which means company success. • Technical Greatest strength: o I am strongest at Java because I LOVE IT. explain why: pros, benefits, etc. • Explain logic of why: Closures, callback, promises are my strength because they suits my comprehensive analytical skills, my brain is wired to work this way already, so JS language came very naturally and easily to me.
6. Why are you looking for a job? (Why are you in the market?)
• I am looking for a job because my current project is ending soon. My manager told me I should start looking for new opportunities. OR Alternative answer: • My company they would love to keep me. We are like a family there. But the company plans to relocate, and I don't feel comfortable with that. I am not planning to leave Dallas.
2. Describe your role?
• I am responsible for developing and maintaining our "test automation framework" base on the POM and adding new test cases to our automated regression suite. • I am mainly responsible for the automation of Academic features as Grading, Attendance, Behavior, Application, Parent and Student Modules. In addition to this also Business features as "Payment Request Management, Fee Tracking, HR Filing Modules. • I performed various types of testing, like; functional testing, smoke testing, regression testing and back-end testing • I am responsible, in my current project, to execute Regression test when developers add new functionality to the application or end of the sprint. • When I joined the company, We had a large regression suit that we had to Automate. Regression coverage for Automation was very low around %10. We had very little automated test cases. Therefore, we were spending a lot of time on Running Regression. Because they didn't have enough time to run all the test cases from regression suite, so we had a lot of new defects, so automation was really needed for the project. Since I joined, they were analyzing the application functionality. For the last two years I have been analyzing the Regression suit, I came up with prioritized test cases like, Which functionality is most used, which functionality is most critical, which functionalities will take a long time to manually execute, which functionalities that break often. • I developed my automation framework from scratch. • I automate test cases. Once I automate test cases, I schedule some of them for a daily smoke test to be repeated as much as needed. The smoke test will then send its report to me and my team. • I run the entire regression suit before each application release. I analyze the test result. I provide a pass-fail report. I monitor the execution to see if anything is wrong, once it fails. If it fails because of my code I have to fix my code. (Perhaps during that time, the application was down, and I ran my script at the wrong time.) If there is really a defect, I log the defect and test it again until it is fixed. • As a Cross functional team member, I help the functional testers, teach them basic automation framework, Java and Selenium to make them part of the team, All to improve productivity of the team. Atleast they can execute test cases and analyze the results. • As a CROSS FUNCTIONAL team member, I also try to help the functional testing team whenever it's needed, to execute manual test cases. And if there is any defect that I am able to reproduce, I log the defect to JIRA. • I also do production support in every major release. Normally production support are on the weekend. I will come and execute 'read only' test cases on production environment after the deployment. If there is any issue on the deployment I have to immediately contact with Dev and QA to fix the issue ASAP. • In sprint grooming meeting I always give feedback to the user stories to make sure it is something testable and measurable. For example: there were a user story said after such and such change in the application the performance should improve. I have asked the business people what do you mean by performance improvement? How do you measure the improvement ? After that they have come up with better user stories(requirement in agile) • Beside that I can tell you one of my responsibilities which I really enjoy is user story generating sessions, because it is very interesting from a user's perspective. Because we are the ones testing the application all the time. I am thinking from the end-user perspective. I think I am doing good, by putting myself in the end user's perspective. Therefore, when we attempt user story sessions, we are making our acceptance criteria much better. So, Business Analyst go over the user stories, they go over the acceptance criteria, we ask questions we give feedback, improve user stories therefore making our team more productive. Because we have better, clear acceptance criteria. That makes us, our requirements better, our code better, clearer and we are avoiding some of defects in terms of the user story generation session itself, instead of having unclear a user story, making unclear code, making something wrong. • Also, as a part of the Agile Scrum Team, I participate in the several walkthroughs meeting for the requirement reviews and provide valuable feedback to the BA. • That is pretty much about %80 of my role as an automation engineer in my current project.
14. Can you work under pressure?
• I don't remember any project that I worked had no pressure. Pressure is good thing sometimes. It forces you to work harder and smarter. • Good pressure, such as having a lot of assignments to work on, or an upcoming deadline, helps me to stay motivated and productive. Of course, there are times when too much pressure can lead to stress; however, I am very skilled at balancing multiple projects and meeting deadlines, which prevents me from feeling stressed often. For example, I once had three large projects due in the same week, which was a lot of pressure. However, because I created a schedule that detailed how I would break down each project into small assignments, I completed all three projects ahead of time and avoided unnecessary stress.
15. How soon can you start?
• I think, I can start in 1 to 3 weeks after getting offer letter and start date.
11. Describe a challenge you faced during your last project?
• I think, one of the biggest challenges that I faced with in my current project is that... o ... we had a new developer. He is young and but very smart kid. Every time I found a bug, it made the developer nervous and he disagreed to accept it and most of the time I had to calm him down and sometimes we had to ask BA for clarification o Then I realize the requirement itself was not specific enough, so I understood it differently than the developer o In the Sprint Retro, I said we should spend more time on requirement clarification because you know that is the key to the project success. We did so and this issue was solved. • This is not very common in many companies but in our company, we have platinum package user clients. They have the right to ask a new report or correction on a feature from day to night or vice versa. Sometimes I got a call at 11pm that there is a feature or report that needs to be tested. So, I had to work many times till 2-3 also 4 am to test those changes or features. (if needed give an example) • Work on result more. I think, the most important problem is misunderstanding and the lack of communication in the business life. If we come together as a group and discuss it, there is nothing we cannot solve. I'm really grateful and blessed to have been in the team that I was in, because we were able to collaborate and come together to solve the problem. • And technical challenge I have faced is locating dynamic elements by retrieving the right HTML code from the web pages. Id's were problem; sometimes it appears on the page, while sometimes it just disappears. Then I had to put either implicit - 7 - or explicit wait to locate them. NON-TECHNICAL Challenges: A. What to do in case of you have too much work and you cannot finish for the deadline? • When developers don't deploy their code on time, our tester team don't have enough time for completion. And the upper management keeps asking for us for completion. - Some of my team members simply focuses on task completion and not on the test coverage and quality of work. - So, at the Sprint Grooming Meeting, I suggested that we should work very closely with the developer and make sure that we are communicating on daily base. - And also, the developers prioritize the important tasks and work on them first. Any scenarios left, would be pushed to the next sprint since it is not as important as the other ones. - Lastly, I try to prioritize my work and follow my test lead and manager whatever they see is more important I start with that. • One of my recent challenge is that another coworker who is also QA had to leave from company for personal reason, probably he had to go to back to his country for some visa issue, and I had to take care of his task with my own since there were only two automation guy, me and Jason. - And the production date cannot be delayed. - So, I took responsibility, I started to make a new plan and communicated with my SM that would try my best, but I need some help to reach the production goal on time. As always, communication is key to understand each other to the better team work. - And also, developers joined to test application as well. At the end, we made it on time. - That is one of the reasons I am proud of to be a member of the scrum team. Everybody works for same goal and share the responsibility. • I don't really have technical challenges because I consider any issue that is technical to be a part of my job. There will always be some challenge to overcome and I ALWAYS overcome and learn. what is really challenging, in my opinion, and not always so easy to fix is: PEOPLE. again, we work 40+ hours with the same people in high stress, fast paced environments. - often-times, they are from different cultures, countries, backgrounds, etc. which can make communication extremely difficult - naturally, conflicts corrupt, and I've had extensive experience in observing, and eventually learning to prevent and solve such conflicts. - how do I do this? - by paying attention, empathizing and above all, communicating effectively. this means, doing a lot of work with a lot of people, because conflicts generally involve two or more participants and can negatively impact the rest of the team, thereby reducing productivity. - happy employees mean productive employees. - I've learned through trial and error to really understand my colleagues and be able to navigate the tricky waters of office-place politics. for example, [go into specific example] B. How do you handle conflict? • Nothing is personal. Everyone thinks company's benefits so I would like to explain my concern and his/her explanation makes sense for me. - Of course, I can do the things which is most helpful to my company. So, I try to communicate with his/her, and I would try to understand the concern. Because everyone have the same goal and wants to get job done successfully.
4. Tell me about your project?
• I'm currently working on an application in which my team are specifically focused on search FUNCTIONALITY. FRAMEWORK • In my framework, I was developing my testing code using Java programming language and Selenium WebDriver. • I used Maven to manage and centralize my dependencies which I have pom.xml • My framework was structured based on the POM that every page element go to one class and it makes easy to maintenance and to keep my code organized and clean. o Also, I have separate classes where I keep my implemented step ... o I created other separate folders for my drivers, for my runners and for my useful methods. • My framework supports Behavior Driven Development (BDD) and scenario outline. • I am using Jira as bug tracking tool. • And I achieve continuous integration and schedule my tests using Jenkins. (I accomplished X THING, by doing Y THING, and achieved Z MEASURABLE RESULT) • Nice little touch: achievement during this project, that really helped me grow as an automation tester, was that I discovered ISSUE X, did ACTION Y, and then measurable result Z happened.
19. What do you do if I hire you?
• In first week, you know, I will get done all the paper works, getting the machines and necessary access to the project, databases etc. • Then I will have to learn the company culture. Boarding process. • I have to learn also more about my projects and my teammates. • I think, understanding what the project is doing, it is very important if I want to be more productive.
16. Can you start tomorrow?
• It won't be fair to my current company and My team won't be happy with me if I leave tomorrow, and I don't think it is professional and I have never done that before. I am so sorry I cannot start tomorrow. • I have to transfer the automation framework knowledge to other team members before I leave.
23. Do you have any question for us?
• It's very important to ME, that I'm surrounded by good/kind, hard-working, smart people that will motivate me to also work hard and continue to improve myself. Considering that we spend more time at work with our colleagues than we do with friends or family even, it's important to me know that I can fit in with the culture of my workplace and grow as a professional there. So, what is your company culture like? What's the team like? (if you did research you can bring up something interesting about the company and ask them to elaborate/how it works etc. • it's also important to me that I continually improve and try to achieve excellence in my position and the best way to do this is to continually learn. I'm always trying to learn new things or learn old things better. Do you provide trainings, seminars or anything to support the education of your employees?
3. Can you describe your daily activity?
• My daily activities at work, Mostly, I go to work early in the morning and check result report of Smoke test to make sure that environment is up and running and the application is stable or not for the day. • If something goes wrong, I will send out an email to my team so they can take care of it asap before everyone comes to work, to reach maximum productivity. • And then I check my email if there are any important tasks or notices, also check my schedule if there are any meetings for the day and also check Jira to review what needs to be done that day in which priority. • Then I go to attend daily standup meeting with my scrum team to talk about what I did yesterday, what we will do today and are there any impediments in my way. This meeting takes about 15 minutes. • After that, I go back to my desk and start automating test cases from regression suits. And also, I automate test cases from sprint backlog after doing manually if it is passed. We are end of our sprint and we are finishing our automating, test execution, reporting, preparing for and conducting Sprint Demo • Also, once a week, we have Code Review meetings, to review the code. this is really helpful • Most fulfilling for me, is my mentoring sessions with junior testers or developers in which i train them on automation and sometimes non-technical skills. we do this as a brown bag lunch, and it really helps us increase our overall productivity, saving the company resources and money but also, gives us the valuable opportunity to get to know our coworkers and at the end of the day, the most important thing to me in my opinion, is the people I work with.
17. How much are you expecting from us? or For how much you are willing to work us?
• My expectation is between 90-100K. It will be big motivation for me to have some amount of increase. ( remember that 48 is depended on your confidence level. You can increase it if you want. The reason they ask you is they want to confirm the rate. They will have specific budget and consulting firm has to mark up a couple dollars to make some money. So, it is always negotiable. If you say too low, it means you are not confident. )
5. What is your biggest Accomplishment?
• One of my accomplishments I would say is establishing a great trustworthy relationship within the team. • If you are asking for technical : When I joined my last project, the application had very less "id" so I had to spend hours to locate one Webpage elements in my POM project so I communicated with developers and other team members and all together we come up with the solution which I got the access to put "Id"in the application by myself. • That was great for me it saved my and others time. So instead of spending time to locating elements I spend my time to more creating automation test scripts and executing them. • I really love to find and use new tools. And before I joined the team, they only had taken screenshots in PNG format. But I started to use GIF animated images with notations which makes the issue a lot clearer to understand for the developers.
12. How do you handle stress?
• One of our sprints my developer deployed code very late time and I didn't have much time to get job done. But I was working so hard worked extra hours and especially nights and I was finished my task on time. • My first approach is trying to calm down and work extra hours. I try to react to situations, rather than to stress. That way, the situation is handled and doesn't become stressful. Mostly these have helped me to handle stress. I also eat chocolate. • Also, in scrum environment we working as a team. I always maintain good communication and relationship with my colleagues. So, they trust me, and they can communicate with me very easily. I always avoid miscommunication and my team believe me every time. • Sometimes some requirements are not understandable, so I try to figure out and I try to understand the requirements. In the beginning of the application I spend extra effort to understand functionality. Sometimes it takes time to understand.
20. May I contact your current employer for reference?
• Please go ahead, (to recruiters) if you would like to submit my resume. But I am receiving a lot of phone calls from other recruiters. I don't want to let anyone to call my employer if they are not sure to submit my resume or not. (if they say they will submit your resume then tell them you will send out asap after work. )
21. What do you like the most about testing?
• Testing is fun job for me because you are very important person to the client and end users. I love testing because as end user I want to buy better product that is peas of art and defect free. Also, I am helping others to make sure their product has top quality. Imagine if you are testing the safety features of the Toyota Camry you are almost saving 100 of lives by doing your job and loving your job.
What is your weakness?
• Well, I think my weakness is that whenever I am given some responsibilities and there is a deadline for it, I work day and night, sometimes 7 days a week. This is bad for my family life; the reality is I cannot sleep unless I am done with my assignments. GREATEST weakness? • My greatest weakness was that I am a very dedicated and passionate person towards my job. • While this may sound like a good quality to have, but you know if the team members do not share that the same passion as you, it might be very frustrated. Like, I saw people don't follow their requirements , I was always waiting the people take seriously against all problems which we face. • I realized that I had to take practical, realistic steps to improve upon this weakness. • And I think it is important that to be able to open dialogue and some kind of communication methods to ensure all team members in our scrum team have great chemistry. • I have organized many activities outside of work such as: coffee meeting, escape room, some barbeque organization which I love :) . • This helped me to connect closely my team members with their family and especially their environment and understand them better and the most importantly these helped my team members understand my passion towards the work. • Also, I have enrolled in some leadership courses to help me understand the dynamics of a team and how I can mentor my team members to get my mentality. • As a result, I have improved the chemistry of our scrum team and our projects have been released with the highest customer satisfaction. • I truly have had a good experience combating my weakness and I am very proactive when it comes to approaching a problem