The success of an application depends heavily on testing. Application testing’s primary goal is to produce high-quality, bug-free applications while cutting down on testing time and costs. Its objective is to build enough trust in the stakeholders for them to release the application to users. However, due to time and expense restrictions, it is getting harder to manually test every aspect of an application. This is where test automation, also known as automation testing, helps in automating repeated predefined tasks with the help of tools, scripts, and software.

Manually identifying flaws or problems requires a lot of time, money, and repetition, and is prone to human mistakes. Because of this, a technique to automate the testing process was required to match the development pace.

Organizations will gain a competitive edge by automating application testing. By programmatically running the test’s code, providing the pre-configured inputs, and comparing the actual output to the anticipated outcome, testing can be carried out using automation tools.

The job market of today won’t accept testers who only have manual testing skills, particularly at a time when automation testing is expanding quickly. Even the most qualified, experienced, and sought-after candidates might face nervousness during a job interview. When preparing for an interview involving automation testing, it is vital to think about the subject broadly and to be as ready as you can be for every eventuality.

You need to be familiar with the test automation industry’s most frequently asked questions if you want to succeed in your interview. In light of that, this article will assist you in getting ready for your interview in a sufficient manner. Here, we will provide you with the most popular queries regarding automation testing that come up during interviews. We have separated it into two categories one for beginners and one for experts for easier understanding. So let’s talk about them.

Automation Testing Interview Questions For Beginners

Describe automation

Any procedure that can minimize human labor is called automation.

What is testing via automation?

The practice of automation testing involves a tester using an automation tool or scripts to carry out testing duties including entering data, running test stages, comparing findings, etc. Automation testing’s major objective is to save time, money, and labor on routine tests that don’t change very often. Lowering the number of tests that must be run manually, also improves efficiency, speed, and reliability without completely replacing manual testing.

What are the different kinds of automated testing?

There are different testing techniques that you can automate.

Unit tests- These are written by software engineers and refer to the isolation testing of a single piece of code. To cut down on bugs, it is typically done throughout the development stage.

User interface (UI) tests- UI tests are performed at the testing level, where tests are scripted to test how an application’s user interface functions. It makes sure there are no broken visual or graphical elements on the screen and that the user experience is consistent.

Integration tests- These examine the connectivity of various software components.

Regression tests- Make sure no functionality was broken by the new code.

Perform performance tests to make sure the program won’t crash and operate properly under demanding or extreme circumstances.

To test the application with given input and for the expected output, functional tests are also carried out at the testing level by simulating functional situations.

When should a test be automated?

In the following circumstances, automation is desirable

  • If the test involves repetition.
  • When the tested feature does not frequently change how it behaves.
  • When it takes a lot of time for a human tester.
  • There are challenging computations in the test.
  • The test verifies that a new update didn’t break the prior functionality.
  • Tests for Sanity and Smoke.

When will you intend to stop using automated testing?

Despite the benefits, it is not a good idea to automate all of your tests. In the following situations, automation is not advised.

  • When the functionality or program being tested changes often.
  • Exploratory testing is not a good fit for automated testing. A human tester is significantly more capable of exploring the program than a computer is.
  • Unless the automated tests are configured or coded to seek UI issues, they are unable to detect any UI flaws. A human tester will be considerably more effective at identifying any UI irregularities or design flaws.
  • Test scenarios that require thorough setup before each run
  • Test cases that produce unexpected test outcomes
  • Discard unexpected test cases

What stages comprise the automation process?

The steps involved in the automation process are: choosing the test tool; defining the scope of automation; planning, design, and development; test execution; and maintenance.

Describe a test script.

A test script is a piece of code that executes a series of commands on an application. It is employed to check if the program is operating under the specifications of the software.

The script’s execution results in a pass or fails for the test, depending on whether the application performs as expected.

Does automation testing require documentation?

Test Automation relies heavily on documentation. To ensure that the processes and procedures can be repeated, one should document them all. Test cases, designs, code modifications, automation strategies, bug reporting, and user manuals should all be documented.

Describe a framework.

A framework is a set of rules, presumptions, concepts, and coding best practices for building the execution environment in which the automated tests will run. These guidelines include:-

  • Coding guidelines.
  • Processing environment files and properties files.
  • Handling test data.
  • Maintaining and handling elements (object repository in QTP).
  • Reporting data.
  • Handling logs.

What is a framework for automated testing?

An automation testing framework should be simple to use, alter, extend, and independent of the application.

The task of developing a test harness with a way to connect with the application being tested, accept input from a file, run the test cases, and produce reports for test execution falls to an automation testing framework.

What kinds of frameworks are utilized for automation testing?

Keyword-driven frameworks, data-driven frameworks, hybrid frameworks, and linear scripting are among the several types of frameworks.

Is automation possible without a framework?

Frameworks are recommendations, not strict guidelines, for writing and running automation scripts. Therefore, while automation can be done without a framework, it would be simple to implement if one were built and followed.

Can we attain complete automation?

No, not all processes can be automated. It is challenging to achieve 100% automation because there are some situations in which a registration page has a captcha or in which we rarely run certain test cases. The automated suite will not benefit from automating these cases because they are not used frequently.

Automation Testing Interview Questions For experts

What are the criteria for selecting an automated testing tool or framework?

To identify the tool for Automation testing There are lots of options to choose from numerous alternatives. Here are some standards by which one can evaluate these tools.

  1. Thoroughly understand the project’s needs and list the testing scenarios to be automated.
  2. Check the list of tools that support the specifications for your application.
  3. Determine the cost of the automation tool. Choose the equipment that fits your budget.
  4. Determine whether you have qualified resources on hand for the tools. Determine the cost of retraining current resources or hiring new ones if you don’t have the required trained resources.
  5. Then assess each tool against important standards like:
  • How simple is it to create and update the tool’s scripts?
  • Can a non-technical individual run the test cases with minimum instruction?
  • Does the tool support a variety of platforms?
  • Does the tool offer a test reporting feature?
  • How effective is the tool for supporting web-based applications across browsers?
  • The number of languages the tool supports.
  1. After comparing the tools, pick the one that fits your budget and satisfies your application’s needs.

What is a modular testing framework?

The abstraction principle is the foundation of the modular testing architecture. In this kind of framework, the tester writes scripts for each application module that is being tested, and test cases are then created by combining the scripts in a hierarchical order.

What qualities make a test automation framework effective?

  • Modular- The framework ought to be flexible in order for testers to adapt the scripts to the environment.
  • Reusable- All scripts should have easy access to a file containing the frequently used utilities or functions.
  • Consistent- By adhering to good coding principles, the test suite should be written consistently.
  • Independent- It is best to write the test scripts so that they are independent of one another.
  • Reporting- After the scripting is complete, the outcomes and reports can be provided via email.
  • Integration- The framework for automation should make it simple to integrate it with other programs.

What are the most widely used testing automation tools?

Selenium, Appium, Cucumber, Watir, Ranorex, and UFT (Unified Functional Testing) are the most widely used test tools for automation testing.

Cypress, what is it?

An open-source testing framework is Cypress. It is created in JavaScript and has recently grown in popularity due to its simplicity and wide range of capabilities that allow for browser testing; user manuals ought to be well-documented.

Describe cucumber

An open-source (BDE) behavior-driven development tool is cucumber. It is a tool used for testing web-based applications that are automated and support a variety of languages, including Java, Ruby, Scala, Groovy, etc. The cucumber reads plain text executable requirements and checks the program being tested against them.

Can you describe Selenium?

Selenium is a framework for the automated testing of web applications. It is independent of the OS and supports a variety of browsers. Additionally, Selenium supports several programming languages, including Java, C#, PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc.

An open-source collection of libraries called Selenium can be used to create new test frameworks or test scripts for web-based applications.

Can manual testing be replaced by automation?

Manual testing is not a substitute for automation testing. It certainly reduces but only eliminates the manual testing that a human tester would conduct. To ensure that bugs are caught automatically in the future, automation tests can be added once a human tester finds one. By quickly completing many surface-level tests, automated testing contributes to time savings over time.

On the other hand, manual testing is crucial to the development of applications, and testing, on the other hand, is crucial to the development of applications and is useful in situations where automation is not an option. A human tester must carry out certain sorts of testing, including exploratory testing, usability testing, and accessibility testing.

I am hopeful the “Automation Testing Interview Questions” above will help you excel in your interview. Visit LambdaTest if you want to learn more about automation testing.

Test automation using LambdaTest

In today’s fast-paced, competitive world, it is simpler for organizations to migrate toward cloud-based services than to set up and maintain their own Test Automation Environment to produce high-quality apps.

Testing on a cloud-based platform offers several advantages, such as almost no startup cost and expense, no hassle with updating and maintaining infrastructure, 24/7 access to resources, improved team collaboration, support for different test environments, and a quicker time to market for apps. Therefore, we can say that cloud-automated testing is a trend that is not going to go away.

LambdaTest is a cloud-based test automation platform that combines the strength of both manual and automated testing to fulfill all the organization’s testing needs. Testing desktop web, mobile web and native applications are supported by this automation platform in several scripting languages, including JavaScript, Ruby, Python, C#, Pearl, etc.

The ability to create complicated automated test scripts without any coding, reuse test scripts, run functional UI tests concurrently, create tests with or without a script, and script in any modern language are just a few of its noteworthy capabilities.

This platform allows you to execute automated test scripts on a scalable, secure, and dependable cloud of more than 3000 actual devices, browsers, and operating systems with their corresponding versions. Geolocation testing, which enables application testing from any location in the world, is one of its strengths. Codeless test automation and numerous third-party integrations make it possible to accelerate testing and shorten the time it takes to deploy an application.

The fact that LambdaTest can be easily linked with the CI/CD pipeline and the bug logging tool is another aspect that makes it popular with developers and testers. They can now trace bugs that appear during the testing process right away thanks to this platform. Other noteworthy features include automated full-page screenshots across a variety of devices, browsers, operating systems, and resolutions, as well as interactive live testing in a real web browser environment.