Interview notes

1. Why did you want to be a QA? How you make your choice?

 

It happened 2 years ago. At that time, I decided to go to Shanghai for some personal factors. Actually, I applied for both the position dev and test and finally got 2 types of offers. The reason why I decided to be here is 1. It is a Microsoft project, I believed that I can learn a lot if have the experience. 2. I have the chance to do automation testing. This sounds good to me. So I joined BS and be a tester. I can say that I fall in love with testing during testing experience.

 

2. How you measure the performance of team members.

It depends, since different members play a different role and have different responsibilities within the team.

As a tester, we may check the bug quality/quantity.automation quality/quantity and also other contribution, for example, some guys in our team usually share some useful knowledge proactively with the team. This is really a good thing and we encourage the kind of contribution. Any kinds of proactive contribution are encouraged.

For each member, he/she must be familiar with the feature functionality. Especially for the feature owners, He/she must be the expert of the feature, could help to resolve the feature specific issue from feature members working with him, or from members from other features, or even from the MS FTES.

There are also other checkpoints for feature owners, the feature owner needs to make sure the status of the feature is always on track,that is the feature status is not red in my report. He needs to assign the sub work items to the related feature members,have a reasonable schedule on the feature work items, help to resolve the issues from the feature members. another very important checkpoint is he needs to make sure the communication with MS feature owner goes smoothly. The communication should be closely and effective. In this way, We could say we are working together with MS FTES to insure the quality of the product and make contribution to the features.

 

3. what’s your daily work?

I may do different things everyday. As a lead, I responsible for some specific work items. For example, If we get a work item from the MS counterpart, like Test pass. The schedule of the test pass usually are defined.

What I need to do after I get the work item about test pass. 1. Make a initial plan for it. The plan includes what test strategy we would use, manual or automation, what is the goal. which version of build should we use. what bug template should the team guys use, what rules/instructions should the team guys follow and also the machine info etc.

When the plan are nailed down and all my issues on the work item are resolved by the MS counterpart, I will send out a email to inform the team that we have a test pass to work on or sometimes we would get together  and share the info in the meeting with them. But most of the time, we are not able to find a big meeting room could hold 40 members. So mail or instant communication tool is the best choice. During the process, we usually need to identify some blocking issues ahead of time and I will track the status based on the data and send out the daily/weekly reports to team and to customers in Microsoft. Track the status is not so hard. I can generate the reports using excel in several minutes by querying the data directly from SQL Server database.The most tricky thing is to make some plans or reasonable strategy for risks.By the end of test pass. We need to do some end things like repairing some broken machines, but the most important is to make a summary for this experience. What’s the status for each different stage during the test pass. How many productivity per person or per day. What’s the bug status during test pass.  What’s the low points need to improve? What’s the high points we have in this test pass? etc..

All the guys in the team are encouraged to contribute his/her ideas to the summary.

And also some other work stuffs. Like specific testing works.

 

4. What’s your strength?

As a tester, I have big passion on the testing work.Thought of different kinds of scenarios to make sure the feature functionality are tested as complete as possible. I called it deep test.

As a lead, the comment from my team members is I am a strict and effective lead.

I will set kinds of instructions for them. But sometimes, the rules are disobeyed and mistakes exposed. It’s ok for the first or second time. But no third time mistake. So may due to this reason, they said I am strict. But I can feel that they are trust me. This is also what I expected.

Once the plan are nailed down, I would drive the work items to complete in time with high quality. No exceptions are expected.

But I also hope each guy could learn things during the experience in the team.So I will book the English class for them and take the class with them. when time permits, we will hold some training courses internally.

5. How you do automation?

We have 2 kinds of automation, one is commandlet line autoamtion and the other is UI automation. The product are integrated with powershell, that means all actions can take in UI can also be taked in commandlet line through powershell. And we assist different tools for each automation.

For commandlet line automation, we assist the an internal XML based tool and c# to build the test cases.

For UI automation, we assist the codedUI framwork in the VS2010. and also use c# language to develop the test cases.