Software Testing and QA Interview Questions for India 2026

Types of testing: Unit (individual functions), Integration (component interactions), System (complete application), Acceptance/UAT (stakeholder end-to-end), Regression (after code changes), Smoke (critical features after a build), Sanity (narrow re-test of changed area), Exploratory (unscripted experience-based). Test design techniques: Equivalence Partitioning (valid and invalid input groups), Boundary Value Analysis (values at input range edges), Decision Table Testing (complex business rules with multiple conditions), State Transition Testing (login/logout flows, carts). Verification vs validation: Verification: are we building the product right? Validation: are we building the right product?

Selenium WebDriver + Java/TestNG is the standard stack at Indian service IT QA teams. Python + Selenium is increasingly common. Key concepts: locators (id, className, CSS selector, XPath), waits (explicit vs implicit vs fluent), Page Object Model (POM: separating page element code from test code). Cypress: modern JavaScript-based testing, faster execution, better debugging: increasingly preferred at product companies. Playwright (Microsoft): multi-browser, better parallel execution, growing rapidly. Appium: mobile app testing for iOS and Android. API testing: Postman, RestAssured (Java), pytest-requests (Python).

Defect lifecycle: New, Assigned, In Progress, Fixed, Closed/Reopened/Rejected/Deferred. Good bug reports: concise title, environment, numbered reproduction steps, expected vs actual result, severity, priority, screenshots/logs. Severity vs Priority: severity = impact on system. Priority = urgency to fix. A cosmetic bug on the homepage might be Low Severity but High Priority. Test management tools: JIRA (most common), TestRail, HP ALM (large enterprise). ISTQB Foundation Level (CTFL): widely referenced in Indian QA job postings. Recommended for early-career QA professionals.

Senior QA interviews test framework design: POM (Page Object Model): page-specific code separated from test code: maintainability and reusability. When UI changes, update the POM class, not the tests. Data-Driven Testing: separate test data from test logic. Data stored in Excel/CSV/JSON. TestNG DataProvider, pytest parametrize. BDD (Behaviour-Driven Development): Gherkin Given-When-Then syntax readable by non-technical stakeholders. Tools: Cucumber (Java/Ruby), Behave (Python). Widely used where PMs are involved in QA. Test parallelism: Selenium Grid or TestNG parallel groups to reduce execution time.