Testing Developers

Jurgen Appelo, author of "The #1 Blog in Europe for Software Development Managers" recently published a post "100 Interview Questions for Software Developers"

It was good to see there were 10 questions about testing so I thought it would be fun to put my old ex-dev hat on and see what answers I would have come up with a few years ago...


Do you know what a regression test is?
How do you verify that new changes have not broken existing features?

Blank stare
We ship the software and the customers tell us

How can you implement unit testing when there are dependencies between a business layer and a data layer?

Unit whatting ?
Blank stare

Which tools are essential to you for testing the quality of your code?

Turning on compiler warnings ?

What types of problems have you encountered most often in your products after deployment?

Too many bugs in them that need months of fix-ship-fix-ship cycles

Do you know what code coverage is?
What types of code coverage are there?

Blank stare
Blank stare

Do you know the difference between functional testing and exploratory testing?
How would you test a web site?

Blank stare.
Click about on the web site and see if it crashes

What is the difference between a test suite, a test case and a test plan?
How would you organize testing?

Blank stare
Have a bug bash just before we ship

What kind of tests would you include for a smoke test of an ecommerce web site?

Login and buy something

What can you do reduce the chance that a customer finds things that he doesn't like during acceptance testing?

Don't send him the program ?

Can you tell me something that you have learned about testing and quality assurance in the last year?

It would be nice if we had some

The blog also got me thinking if I could come up with 100 questions for testers

And it's a good thing Jurgen wasn't interviewing me a few years ago...