The Quality Engineering Interview
A behind-the-scenes look at how Slalom Build evaluates QE candidates
Interviews are stressful and exhausting. Here, come into this unfamiliar office or join this awkward Zoom call. Put on uncomfortable clothes and answer tough questions in front of complete strangers. No pressure, it’s just your entire career on the line.
We understand the pressure this creates and sympathize with the anxiety created by the interview process . Burdensome take-home assignments? Gotcha whiteboard questions? Cliché ‘tell me about your weaknesses’ behavioral questions? Yuk.
We can’t remove all the stress of interviewing, but we can be as transparent as possible about what we ask and why we ask it. The skills we are looking for and the questions used to evaluate those skills should not be secret, they should be freely available and openly shared with everyone interested.
In this article we will describe our quality engineering interview process, the different types of conversations you’ll have, and the purpose of each. Hopefully understanding this will reduce some unnecessary anxiety, at least slightly.
However, this is just a prelude for what follows: a compilation of real interview questions by real quality engineering interviewers, why they ask those questions, and what they’re looking for in the response. This will allow you to see behind the proverbial curtain and get into the heads of the interviewers sitting across the table (or call) from you.
But wait, won’t this give away the answers? We don’t see it that way.
For one, interviews are not a series of trivia questions in which there is one memorisable answer. Instead, each question is the start of a conversation that can go countless directions. It’s less about what you know, and more about how you think. Memorized answers without the understanding and critical thinking behind them will quickly flounder as the conversation progresses down paths for which the candidate has no precalculated response.
Secondly, we absolutely want to you to use these questions to prepare for your interview.
Preparing doesn’t mean memorizing the specific answer you are about to read, it means understanding the types of questions we ask and why, then using that knowledge as a guide as you review recent relevant experiences and specific technical topics. Doing this will be significantly more valuable and lead to substantially better interview outcomes than regurgitating a particular response you read here.
It’s not cheating to prepare for an interview, and reviewing relevant material won’t just make you a better interviewee, it will make you a better quality engineer.
No more preamble. Let’s explore the general composition of a quality engineer interview loop.
The Quality Engineer Interview
Interview loops will look different based on candidate seniority and schedule availability, but every loop can be broken down into three parts: initial screens, either with a recruiter or a senior quality engineering leader, skills screens to assess technical ability, and behavioral screens to evaluate behavioral characteristics.
Let’s look at each.
The initial screen
The initial screen consists of one or more conversations with a recruiter or senior quality engineer. These are our first full conversations with you, so it’s as much about discovery as it is about assessment. We’re looking to answer questions like: Who are you? What are you looking for in the next step of your career? How well does that match the role? What level (title) should we be evaluating you at? … among other things.
While a part of the initial screen is discovery, don’t take it lightly. You will definitely be asked challenging technical and behavioral questions about your work experience, relevant technologies, specific areas of expertise, and many other areas. In initial screens these tend to be more general and exploratory.
While the initial screen allows us to learn about you, it’s also an important opportunity for you to learn about us. You might have researched us through LinkedIn or our website, these do not compare to directly asking questions to the person sitting across form you. Don’t pass up this opportunity.
Can’t think of anything? Here are some interesting questions I’ve been asked by candidates during initial screens:
What do you like about being a quality engineer at Slalom Build compared to other places you have worked?
What is one thing you would change about your role if you could change anything?
How has Slalom Build helped you achieve your long term career goals?
The initial screen helps us understand who you are and how you might fit into our organization. However, to fully assess your ability to be successful, we need to dig deep into quality engineering. This brings us to the skills interview.
The skills interview
The skills interview is where we get into the nuts and bolts of quality engineering. This interview will be given by another experienced quality engineer, and will probably be done with the aid of a collaboration tool such as Miro.
There are a lot of topics that can fall under a skills interview. What the interviewer decides to cover will significantly depend on your experience level and background. Here are general categories that you might be assessed in:
Quality Assurance: Quality engineers are more than testers, but testing—thinking critically and destructively about the value proposition of software—is a critical and foundational skill. As a quality engineer, you need to know how to test. You need to be able to look at complex, modern software and think how might this fail?. This might include developing test cases for a mock Agile story or creating a test plan for a simple software system.
Test Automation: You cannot effectively deliver modern software without automated testing, and we will evaluate your level of expertise in this area. This includes both the theory of test automation, as well as practical knowledge of modern automation tooling. If you are a more experienced candidate, you should have opinions on these tools, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they best integrate into a wholistic automation strategy.
Software Engineering and Software Architecture: Test automation is software development. To build test automation correctly, you need to be comfortable with modern programming languages and applying all the fundamental concepts of software engineering, so your skills interview will likely include coding. Don’t let this scare you; we don’t care about syntax or even the language you prefer, its more about how you think and problem solve.
Similarly, to test modern software you have to understand how software works. You don’t need to design systems from scratch, but an understanding of software design concepts is important. Quality engineers don’t view software as a magical black box, we get into, underneath, and in between all the moving parts and pieces. Skills interviews will likely asses your comfort with software architecture.
DevOps: Test automation doesn’t have value sitting on your hard drive. The incorporation of both manual and automated validation steps into a CI/CD pipeline, and how that impacts things like branching strategy, test environment strategy, test data management, etc. is well within the domain of the quality engineer.
Agile QA: We develop software using Agile principles. You should understand how quality engineering fits into standard Agile development models. Don’t be surprised if you get asked to describe how a QE contributes to story refinement, or what a Definition-of-Done is. Again, how much we get into Agile delivery models and the role of a QE will depend on your level of experience.
Specialized Test Topics: Of course, there are many other specialty areas under the umbrella of quality engineering: performance testing, accessibility testing, security testing, etc. Depending on your level and previous experience, the skills interview might get into these as well.
The amount of skills necessary to excel as a quality engineer is vast, and the above categories are necessarily oversimplified. For a full description of the skills we feel are relevant in the quality engineering role, see our Quality Engineering Learning Roadmap.
The technical aspects of equality engineering assessed in the skills interview are critical for success as a quality engineer. However, building modern software in a collaborative, team-based environment requires more than just technical skills. This brings us to the behavioral interview.
The behavioral interview
Thriving as a quality engineer isn’t just about technical skills — programming languages, tools, frameworks, etc. Just as important, it’s about who you are as a person: the behavioral characteristics you bring to the collaborative, intense, incredibly complex effort of software development.
That sounds fluffy. What exactly are behavioral characteristics? Here’s a few examples:
In order to succeed as a quality engineer, you need to be curious and enjoy learning. Quality engineering is so broad and changing so rapidly that you will need to continually learn new tools, frameworks, languages, and other technologies. It’s more than just a willingness to learn, you should actively enjoy it. We find this learner mindset to be a strong indicator of success in the quality engineering role.
In order to collaborate in cross-functional, Agile teams, you need to be able to communicate effectively. Effective communication is not having a large vocabulary, it’s the ability to convey complex ideas through language. Can you explain a topic without going on tangents or getting lost in subtopics? Can you clearly articulate subtle or nuanced concepts? Can you communicate to influence people, create consensus, or diffuse conflict? These are all valuable behavioral skills under the umbrella of communication.
In order to continually improve, you need to be able to introspect — to think critically about yourself and your own performance. You need to be able accept feedback and leverage this feedback positively. How are you working on yourself right now? What piece of feedback from a previous mentor has been particularly impactful to you, and why? Healthy and honest introspection is a valuable behavioral characteristic and highly corelated to long term career potential.
These are just a few examples, but you get the idea.
Here’s an inside secret: many behavioral characteristics are assessed not through specific, direct questions, but in how you answer other questions. For example, it’s often easy to evaluate curiosity and passion for learning during technical questions. Some candidates enjoy the challenge and get excited to explore whatever topic the question is digging into, even if it’s an area they are not comfortable in. We don’t have to construct behavioral questions to determine curiosity, curiosity bubbles out of every answer they give.
Selected questions from real interviewers
That’s the quality engineering interview loop. Now that you have the general context, jump over to next article for some real questions from real interviewers. Hopefully, these questions and answers shed additional light on how specific interviewers assess the things discussed above.
See our Careers page for open roles in Slalom Build Quality Engineering
