Job Interview

Entry-level Quality Assurance Engineer Interview Preparation Guide

04 Dec 2021 ~3 min read

Before going through the preparation strategies for an entry-level QA Engineer role, I want to talk a bit about the activity that a QA Engineer does on regular day-to-day work.

The major task of a QA Engineer is to ensure the quality of the feature that is going to be shipped in a release. Now, what do I mean by quality? The following are 2 recommended readings to get the answer -

One aspect to ensure the quality of a feature is to minimize the number of bugs. A bug is an error that produces undesired or incorrect results and this is an excellent article to know more about bug types. Since as a QA Engineer one of your tasks is to detect bugs in a feature of an application, you should prepare on gaining relevant skills that will enable you to detect bugs. Some of those skills are -

Critical Thinking

Instead of writing about this skill in detail, I will ask you to read the following resources -

To develop your critical thinking skills, my advice is to solve problems. The problems can be mathematical puzzles or algorithmic challenges.

Knowledge of SQL

Usually, the application you are going to test as a QA Engineer will use a relational database. So, you will need to extract data from the database for analysis and for verifying expectation vs reality. To perform these tasks, you will need to write SQL queries.

Knowledge of Basic Linux Commands

One of the ways to detect bugs is to check and analyze the log files. The user interface may look right and the end-to-end functionalities may work as expected but there may be an underlying error and that may be only visible in the application logs. To perform log analysis, having a good grasp of basic linux commands is essential.

Knowledge of Automation Test Tools

As a QA Engineer, you will experience scenarios where you need to perform a task repetitively. Sometimes, the task you are performing may be extremely time-consuming. Moreover, there may arise a situation where to test a particular feature you need to generate a bulk amount of data. In these scenarios, automation test tools come into play.

Besides the above-mentioned skills, you need to learn about Software Testing Terminologies, Software Testing Life Cycle and you need to practice. Here are some relevant resources for preparation -