Testing mobile apps may seem like a dream job when you are not into IT yet. Still, to pass the interview for this job one should know plenty of things and be closely familiar with certain technical terms and trends.
To help you get ready for such an interview, we have compiled a list of top 10 answers interviewers are most likely to ask you and supplied the ready-made answers to them.
- What is the difference between mobile application testing and just mobile testing?
Mobile app testing suggests testing an application on hand-held devices and differs from mobile testing in that it focuses on features and functionality of the tested application only while the other closely focuses on mobile devices’ native application features like SMS, Call, Media Player, etc.
- Can you remember the names of different versions of Android OS?
Of course, you can. Here they are: 1.5 Cupcake, 1.6 Donut, 2.0 Eclair, 2.2 Froyo, 2.3 Gingerbread, 3.0 Honeycomb, 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, 4.1 Jelly Bean, 4.4 Kit Kat.
You may want to know more about the latest one when answering this question. Among the features of Android 4.4 released in October 2013 are:
- Dialer Search helping in searching a nearby thing by the phone number
- Wireless printing capability
- Hangouts SMS Integration
- Downloads app redesign
- Location featured in Quick Settings
- Seeking music and movie from the lock screen
- Do you know which tools are used on Android for capturing app logs?
‘Monitor.bat’ file under Android SDK’s ‘Tools’ folder can be used to see the log, select or save it. ALogCat, a free tool for getting logs featured on Google Play, is another option.
- What major criteria should be taken in consideration while doing end-to-end mobile testing?
The first areas of your attention in this case should be installation, first-time launch without network, app’s uninstallation, its orientation if supported, and testing app performance using different devices with different network scenarios. Further, you may want to test how the app is responding in case of entering invalid user credentials and attempting to change those after installation. If the app is to access the network, it is important to see that logs generating during this contain sensitive information in encrypted form only.
- What mobile application types do you know?
We can distinguish three broad types of mobile apps:
- Native apps are those specifically developed for a certain platform, directly installed on the device and taking the advantage of all its features such as the camera, GPS, compass, etc. These apps utilize the native notification system of device and work offline well.
- Web apps on mobiles are web portals designed and hosted for mobile devices. To access these, URLs are used in mobile browsers.
- Hybrid apps can be viewed as web apps built in native apps. They are written using web technologies like CSS, JavaScript and HTML. They run inside the native container while leveraging the browser engine of a device to render HTML and process JavaScript locally. Such apps are not tied to particular mobile devices or platforms and can work on any.
- How could one test patches and defect fixes for an app in production?
Since regression testing of the whole product cannot be effectively done in a short time, it makes sense to regression-test the relative module and focus mainly on the area related to bug fixes and, additionally, to do sanity testing on the rest of modules on the high priority devices.
- What tools can be used for debugging?
Generally, to learn the cause of an issue where some failure is occurring logs are used. This can be done by means of iPhone Configuration Utility on iOS and Android Monitor.bat on Android. With log provided from these tools it will be easy for developers to tell the cause.
- What mobile automation testing tools do you know?
The means of automation are usually chosen subjectively depending on project needs and application type. Among good paid automation tools available today are Ranorex, Silk Mobile, SeeTest, etc. There are also worthy free tools like Appium, Robotium, KIF, Calabash, etc., but using these requires certain coding skills such as Java or Ruby.
- What is it you can do with a real device that you cannot do with emulators?
Testing on real devices has a number of advantages over emulators. Only using real devices you can test such interrupts as messages, phone calls, battery drain, low battery scenarios, memory card mount and unmount scenarios, Bluetooth, and actual app performance as a whole.
- How can you learn about the app’s CPU usage and its memory utilization?
On Google Play you can find such tools as Usemon, CPU Usage & Process List Viewer, CPU Usage Monitor, etc. Systrace feature from Android monitor can also help when using SDK.
You should remember that your personal experience in mobile testing and real examples are always appreciated, so these answers are mostly useful to proof-check your knowledge.
What other questions were you asked at job interviews when applying for mobile tester job?