Top Manual Testing Interview Questions and Answers

Software testing is very crucial to validate the quality of software products. Companies across the globe are relying on manual testing because of the non-viability of automated testing in every scenario. Manual testing has its usability in cases when automation cannot be done readily. This article lists top manual testing interview questions that will help you to prepare for your upcoming manual testing interview.

 

Manual Testing Interview Questions

The following questions are important for anyone who wants to learn manual testing. 

Q1. What is Software Testing?

Ans. Software Testing is a process of validating a software product by identifying its correctness, completeness, and quality. The process involves several activities that focus on finding errors in the software and related products and ensuring its quality before its market release.

Q2. Why is testing required?

Ans. Software testing is crucial for the following reasons-

• To find out any errors in the product made during the development phases.
• To ensure less resource utilization by identifying any error in the early phases of the software development life cycle.
• To ensure the effective performance of the software and assure the stakeholders.
• To have accurate, consistent, and reliable results.
• To ensure convenience to the user regarding the quality of the product.
• To ensure customer satisfaction and build the customers’ confidence in the organization.
• To avoid monetary penalties concerning the quality of the product.

Q3. When should you start the testing process?

Ans. Ideally, testing must begin from the start of the project. After the requirements are calculated, testers should come up with the system testing plan and start test case preparation. This also helps to find gaps in the process, if any.

Q4. What are the differences between Quality Assurance and Quality Control?

 Ans. It is one of the most crucial manual testing interview questions. It should be explained based on specific features.

Quality Assurance	Quality Control
A process of assuring that consumers receive the desired quality products	A process of fulfilling the quality of desired products
Prevents any defects	Identifies and fixes defects
Does not involve program execution	Involves program execution
A procedure for creating deliverables	A procedure of verifying the created deliverables
Involves the complete software development life cycle	Involves complete software testing life cycle

 

Q5. What are the differences between Verification and Validation?

Ans. Following are the differences between Verification and Validation:

Verification	Validation
Process of verifying documents, design, code, and program	Process of evaluating the final software product to check if it meets customer requirements and expectations
Static in nature	Dynamic
Does not involve code execution	Involves code execution
Human involvement required	Computer-based execution
Low-level exercise	High-level exercise

Q6. What are the different steps involved in manual testing?

Ans. Different steps involved in manual testing include –

• Planning and control
• Analysis and design
• Implementation and execution
• Evaluating exit criteria
• Reporting
• Test closure activities

Q7. What are the different stages of manual testing?

Ans. There are four stages of manual testing include:

1. Unit testing: The process of testing the smallest code logically isolated in a system and ensuring its functional correctness.
2. Integration Testing: The process of combining and testing individual units to verify if they can work smoothly when integrated.
3. System Testing: The process of testing all the components of software to ensure its overall quality. It comprises different testing methodologies including Usability testing, Regression testing and Functional testing.
4. User Acceptance Testing: The process of deciding if a particular software is suitable for market release.

Q8. What is API?

Ans. API or Application Programming Interface is a communication protocol. This protocol is between clients and servers and a contract is created to ensure smooth functioning and building of client-side software. The client describes its requirements and the server is responsible for delivering the product as agreed.

Q9. What is API testing?

Ans. API testing or Application Programming Interface (API) testing determines if the product meets the expectations of the consumers in terms of performance, functionality, reliability, and security.

Q10. What is Acceptance Testing?

Ans. Acceptance Testing is a process in software testing where a system is tested for its acceptability. This test helps the testers to evaluate the system’s compliance in accordance with the clients’ requirements and check if it is acceptable for delivery.

Q11.What is Accessibility Testing?

Ans. Accessibility testing is mandatory in software testing. It verifies if people with disabilities (deaf, blind, mentally unstable, among others) can use the software product.

Q12. What is Adhoc Testing?

Ans. Ad-hoc testing is an informal testing phase aiming to break a system by randomly trying the system’s functionality. It is an unplanned activity and doesn’t follow any test design technique.

Q13. What is Agile Testing?

Ans. Agile Testing is a testing practice following Agile methodologies. It aligns with the iterative development methodology where requirements develop gradually from customers and testing teams.

Q14. What is Static Testing?

Ans. Static Testing is also called Dry Run Testing. In this form of software testing, the actual program or application is not used and the programmers read their code to find any errors.

Q15. What is Dynamic Testing?

Ans. Dynamic testing checks the dynamic behaviour of the code. Under dynamic testing, the software is analyzed against parameters like memory & CPU usage, response time, and overall software performance.

Q16. What is White Box Testing?

Ans. White box testing is a methodology based on the internal code structure of the software and involves examining the program structure. It derives test data from the program logic. White Box Testing is also known as Glass Box Testing, Clear Box Testing, and Structural Testing.

Q17. What is Black Box Testing?

Ans. Black Box Testing is a methodology where the tester tests the product without knowing its internal code structure, design, or implementation. It is also known as Behavioral Testing.

Q18. What is Grey Box Testing?

Ans. Grey Box Testing combines the aspects of both Black Box Testing and White Box Testing. Here the tester performs the test with limited information about the internal structure and functionality of the software.

Q19. What are the different types of defects?

Ans. There are three types of defects including the following:

• Wrong – If requirements are incorrectly implemented.
• Missing – Missing defects refer to missing things. For example – if the specification has not been implemented correctly because of any missing information or link.
• Extra – Extra denotes extra features incorporated in the final product. Since it was not received as a user requirement, it is referred to as a defect.

Q20. What are the limitations of manual testing?

Ans. Manual testing has a few limitations, which include:

• Higher susceptibility to errors because of human intervention
• Time-consuming
• Not feasible to carry load testing and performance testing
• Limited scope compared to automation testing
• Not suitable in very large organizations and projects with time limitations
• Costly

Q21. What is Severity in software testing?

Ans. Severity is the extent to which any defect can affect the software. Severity denotes the implication and the impact of the defect on the functionality of the software.

Q22. What are the different types of severity?

Ans. Severity can be of many types, including –

• Critical – Critical severity results in the termination of a component of a system or the complete system. This leads to extensive data corruption and leaves it unusable. Moreover, there is no acceptable alternative way to achieve the required results.
• Major – The damage done is similar to critical severity; the only difference is that there is an acceptable alternative method to achieve the required results.
• Moderate – Moderate severity does not lead to termination but leads the system to produce incorrect, incomplete, or inconsistent results.
• Minor – Minor defect does not result in termination and does not damage the system usability. Here the desired effects can be easily achieved by working around the defects.
• Cosmetic – Cosmetic defects are related to system improvements and are mainly related to spelling mistakes, alignment issues, or font casing.

Q23. What is the priority in software testing? 

Ans. Priority is the order in which the defects should be resolved. It is the level of business importance to find and fix defects.

Q24. What is a waterfall model? 

Ans. The waterfall model is a part of the software development life cycle as well as software testing. It is one of the first models to be used for software testing.

Q25. Tell me about V’s model in the manual test. 

Ans. Model V is a framework that describes the software development life cycle activities from the specification of requirements to the software maintenance phase. Testing is integrated into each of the phases of the model. 

The modelling phases begin with user needs and are followed by system requirements, overall design, detailed design, application, and system testing of the entire system. Each phase of the model has the respective test activity built into it and is carried out parallel to the development activities. 

This model’s four testing levels include component testing, integration testing, system testing, and acceptance testing.

Q26. What is the difference between error, bug, and defect?

Ans. Bug and defect essentially mean the same thing. It is the failure in a component or system, causing the component or system to fail to perform its required function. If an error or defect is found during the execution phase of software development, it can cause the component or the system to fail. On the other hand, an error is a human error, which results in incorrect results.  

Q27. What is border value analysis? 

Ans. A limit value is an input or an output value that resides on the edge of an equivalency partition. It can also be the smallest incremental distance on each side of an edge, as well as the minimum or maximum value of an edge. Limit value analysis is a black-box testing technique, where tests are based on limit values.

Q28. What is system testing? 

Ans. System Testing is a black box testing technique for evaluating a system’s compliance against specified requirements. System testing aims to evaluate the end-to-end system specifications and deliver a high-quality product.

Q29. What are the different types of system testing?

Ans. Different types of system testing are as follows:

• Usability Testing
• Load Testing 
• Regression Testing 
• Recovery testing 
• Migration testing 
• Functional Testing 
• Hardware/Software Testing

Q30. What is the exact difference between debugging and testing? 

Ans. When a test is performed, and a defect has been identified, the developers must first locate the code’s defect and then fix it. This process is known as debugging. In other words, debugging is the process of finding, analyzing, and eliminating the causes of software failures.

On the other hand, testing consists of both static and dynamic activities of the test life cycle. It helps to determine that the software satisfies the specified requirements and is suitable for further implementation.

Q31. What are the functional tests?  

Ans. Functional tests are defined based on system requirements. This technique tests the system or software’s features/functionality and validates and verifies that it complies with the specifications.

Q32. Differentiate between functional and non-functional tests.

Ans. The following are the differences between functional and non-function tests:

Functional Tests	Non-Functional Tests
Performed using the functional specification provided by the client	Done as per the customer expectation and performance requirements
Verifies the system against the functional requirements	Checks performance, reliability, scalability, and other non-functional aspects of software
Utilizes manual testing tools like Black Box Technique or automation tools like Selenium	Uses software testing tools like Forecast, JMeter, Load Complete, Loadrunner, Loadster, Loadstorm, Loadtracer, etc.
Describes what a product does	Explains how well the product works
Easy to perform	Tougher than functional testing
Checks the operations and actions of an application	Checks the behaviour of an application

Q33. Explain alpha testing and beta testing.

Ans. Alpha Testing is a type of software testing to identify bugs before the release of the product to the public. Beta Testing is performed by actual users of the software application in the real environment. Both Alpha and Beta testing are the user acceptance testing type.

Q34. What is a testbed in manual testing?

Ans. The testbed is an environment that is configured for testing applications, hardware and software that are required to run the program to be tested. It consists of hardware and software, network configuration, application undergoing test and other related software.

Q35. Define a test case. 

Ans. A test case is a document with a set of conditions as actions that must be performed on the software application to verify the expected functionality of that feature. Test cases describe a specific idea to be tested without including the details of steps to be taken.

Q36. Explain the test case life cycle.

Ans. The test case life cycle is a sequence of activities conducted during the testing process for ensuring software quality. It goes through different phases as given below:

• Requirements phase
• Planning Phase
• Analysis phase
• Design Phase
• Implementation Phase
• Execution Phase
• Conclusion Phase
• Closure Phase

Q37. What is the Big Bang Approach?

Ans. The Big Bang Approach is an approach to integration testing strategy. In this method, all software components are combined to form a complex system. The unity of different modules is then tested as an entity.

Q38. What is the difference between volume testing and load testing? 

Ans. Volume testing is a type of performance testing that checks whether the system can cope with a large amount of data. Volume testing is also called flood testing.

Load testing refers to the measurement of the behaviour of a component or a system with increasing load. The increase in load can be in terms of parallel users and/or parallel transactions. This helps to determine the amount of load that can be handled by the software system.

Q39. What is test closure?

Ans. Test Closure is a document that summarizes all the tests conducted during the software development life cycle. Test closure provides a detailed analysis of the bugs removed, errors found, the average count of experiments and imperfections, the total number of defects resolved, the total number of bugs rejected, etc.

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