What interview questions should a developer ask a tester?
We have some interviews coming up whereby we're recruiting for a quality assurance role. The purpose of developers being involved is to understand whether hte person will work well with the development team.
What are the most important question(s) a developer should ask a QA person? I'm looking for practical questions more than fluffy open questions, your thoughts?
Answer
Unfortunately, sometimes, the fluffy open questions are the ones that give you the best view of a person.
Whatever technical questions you ask (and these depend a lot on your development methodology so I can't really help you there, they should be tailored), you should always establish how the potential candidate will work in a team environment.
You need to establish that:
- the person will work well in the team.
- the person will take responsibility for working with development to get bugs fixed, not just "Here's a bug, go fix it, then get back to me".
- the person's ego will not get in the way of the team's work (such as fighting over the classification or severity of bugs). I find this is usually more of a problem with developers getting defensive about "their" code.
I find the best approach in interviews is to present scenarios and ask the candidate what they think, for example:
- it's 4pm Friday afternoon and Bob, a developer, has agreed to work back to fix a high-severity bug. We need a tester to validate the fix and you're the only one available but you had a dinner arrangement. What would you propose?
Just on the answer to that question alone, you could evaluate whether the candidate:
- is useless ("Sorry, I can't miss dinner").
- thinks outside constraints ("Are there really no other testers available?", "Can I validate it on Saturday morning?", "Can Bob work some other time on the weekend?").
- is adaptable ("I could put off dinner just this once").
and so on.
I cannot stress also how communication skills are important to the developer/tester relationship. Have the tester generate a rough bug report (any bug they want to) and discuss its adequacy (exact steps, expected behavior, actual behavior, ...).