For my very first testing job (how I got the interview is a story in itself), the interviewer was a manager who worked in testing for a long time. He asked the following question:
“Our system does the following {describes system}. The problem we have is that for each country where the system is sold, the standard settings have to be different. These settings should work for about 20 countries, and there are dozens of settings. How would you test this?”
The actual answer I gave was, to put it bluntly, very wrong. But what I didn’t know at the time was that I wasn’t being judge on the answer itself, but how I reacted to the question. If I had started my answer with “This is how I would do it…” and then listed off a bunch of test steps, then I wouldn’t have gotten the job. Instead, I started asking questions, as I didn’t quite understand the context of the system. “How have we created testability?” “How have we tested it in the past?” “Can we modify the settings?” “How much time does it take to do the tests now?” “Can we automate portions of the testing?” … and so on. We talked for about 20 minutes just to get to the wrong answer. (Interesting side point, my answer had mostly to do with automation, and what we eventually did was scripting combined with increasing testability and observability).
So here’s what I liked about that question and process.
- It was about a real world problem. Asking about a sink would have been fun, but would still feel fake.
- They used it to judge my process for getting answers rather than the answer itself. A brand new tester couldn’t possibly know enough to get the correct answer on the first shot.
- They used it to judge my interaction with them as a team. If I didn’t ask my own questions, then they might have doubted my ability to ask questions (let alone the right questions) when it really mattered in the context of a project.
So my advice would be that most people who make it as far as the interview would know enough to test a sink/ coffee cup/ pen/ etc. And most people who make it as far as the interview would be willing to learn new things. The trick to the interview would be in finding out if they-or-their-style is right for your team.