High level of reliability, scalability, and interoperability has to be maintained during the entire process of designing and testing, if we want to achieve a commercial success of a final product, or of a software application. To maintain that level is the task for performance testers. If you apply for this job, you should count with an interview process that consists in several rounds.
In the initial stages, they will ask you some personal questions and behavioral questions, to get a good grasp of your personality, and to understand if you would fit in their working environment, and in the team that they already have in place.
After these questions, you will have to deal with practical tasks and technical questions, as the recruiters will try to assess your readiness for the job, and your true knowledge of performance testing. You can see a list of common technical questions below.
Technical questions for your interview
- What features and characteristics are assessed while performance testing is done?
- What do you personally consider as a best tool to conduct performance tests? Why do you prefer it to other, competing solution?
- What does abbreviation MIPS means?
- Define reliability, scalability and interoperability as an attributes of a network of your choice. How would you measure each of these attributes?
- Are there any drawbacks when we speak about manual load testing?
- Can you explain hardware tuning in load testing, in a way that a baker, or a cashier will understand it?
- When do you personally think a new hardware components should be performance tested (in what phase of development) and why?
- How to identify a CPU bottleneck on the application?
- What things should you find out when looking into the standard deviation in load test results?
- Have you ever worked with LoadRunner? Describe us your experiences with this tool.
- Can you define the following performance testing terms in one sentence? Server time, HTTP status code, receive time, round trip time.
- Can you define the acceptable limits for Memory usage in load testing?
- Have you ever heard about performance tuning?
- Where do you see the future of performance testing?
- In the era of cloud computing, what attribute of software applications that are tested using load tests do you consider as the most important?
Behavioral questions – show them the right attitude
You can hardly prepare for every possible technical question you may get in your interview. These questions will vary from company to company, and unless you know your job, unless you understand performance testing, you will struggle with your answers to them. Contrariwise, if you know the job, you will manage to answer most technical questions.
The situation differs when we speak about personal and behavioral questions–the first two stages of the interview process.
These questions are similar in every company, because all testers experience the same situations in their jobs, and in the interaction with their colleagues: conflicts with their colleagues, crisis of motivation, inability to explain technical terms to their colleagues from other departments such as sales or marketing, pressure, tight deadlines, etc. Let’s have a look at the list of them:
- What motivates you the most in work?
- What is your biggest weakness when we talk about performance testing?
- How would you describe your communication skills?
- Tell us about a conflict you had with a colleague in your last job.
- Describe a situation when you felt overwhelmed with work.
- Have you ever experienced a crisis of motivation? What did you do to overcome the crisis?
- Tell us about a time when you used logic to solve a problem.
- When you had to work on multiple projects simultaneously, how did you multitask?
- What’s the best and worst project you’ve ever worked on?
- …
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Final thoughts, next steps
Interview process has become more sophisticated over the years. It is not enough demonstrating excellent technical skills anymore. You have to show right attitude to various situations that happen in the workplace, and convince the hiring managers of your readiness to work as a part of a team.
Try to prepare for both technical and behavioral questions. And do not forget to do a good research about your next employer. Knowing something about them, you will find it easier to make a good connection with the interviewers–which also plays a role. We hope you will succeed, and wish you best of luck!
May also interest you:
- Software testing interview questions – Test, test, test, and what will they test in an interview with you? Check the twenty three common interview questions for software testing job applicants.
- How to overcome interview nerves – Struggling to get your nerves under control before your meeting with the employer? Check our 4 simple strategies and learn how to overcome interview anxiety.
- Process engineer interview questions – One of the most interesting jobs in the field of technology and engineering. You can expect a practical interview, and a combination of behavioral and technical questions
* You can also download the list of technical questions in a one-page long PDF, and practice your interview answers anytime later:
