How to Answer Tough Interview Questions?

I posted this on http://www.lifeheed.com/ (http://www.lifeheed.com/article.php?article=35) earlier and thought it would be valuable for community who are following this blog.

If you are looking for a job change, be prepared for the interview process. Well, preparations may not always help. You may get surprise questions in the interview. You need to apply presence of mind, competence and communication capability to approach towards such questions. Let us first understand what sort of the questions are these and then we will take an approach to ace the interview.

Five Frogs Sitting on a Log

One of my favourite questions when I evaluate testers for my organization goes like this:

There are five frogs sitting on a log. Four of them decide to jump off the log. How many would be remaining on the log.

Critical Bugs in a Web-based Banking Product

Banking products are highly secured. The money transaction, precise calculations, updation at the backend (i.e. database), clear instructions about the steps to be performed for a certain action, security, 24X7 availability of servers, performance and usability are highest priority when it comes to design and develop a banking product.

Testing Interviews

Testing interviews are very tricky. It comprises of evaluating your communication skills, behavioral aspects, attitude, aptitude, customer focus, sensitiveness towards end user's perspective, capability to understand complex and varied nature of documents, capability to produce clear and concise reports, knowledge of processes and standards; apart from the other technical skills.

Technical skills really depend on the job requirement. In general, software companies expect you to be aware of Operating Systems, Databases, Web Servers, App Servers etc. I'm reiterating that the job requirement can vary from project to project, company to company. If you are in niche domains such as mobile testing, network protocol testing or mobile chipset testing you need the domain knowledge well. With certain products domain knowledge also helps a lot. For example, for a product in banking and financial domain, you need some understanding of the domain. It helps in understanding the workflow and the terminologies used in the product.