Drake did not know how close he was to choosing the right tester.

Sooner or later there may come a time when they come to you with a request to find a tester. You can, of course, read some literature about testing - for example, "Testing Dot Com" by Roman Savin. But only, quite possibly, the candidates read it too.

Therefore, I want to share my view on what questions to ask and what qualities to pay attention to when interviewing your first tester.

For the last 5 years I have been working in Yandex.Money as head of the testing department and regularly interviewing people in the position of testers. I had to conduct interviews both for well-known products, and for those about which I myself had to find out a couple of minutes before the interview. Over time, I made the best quest path for me, which I want to share in the article.

# 1 Burn the letters to Santa

Probably, in interviewing, the most important thing is to go without the thought "most likely, this is our man." In my practice, there were more than once ideal resumes, as if specially written for our vacancy. Firstly, they can really be simply written for you, and secondly, in real communication a person can be difficult or just uncommunicative. Therefore, if the candidate does not fit, the preliminary mood for hiring him will be psychologically hard to change.

There is even a common name for pseudo-ideal resumes - “letters to Santa”. They should be added at the beginning: “Dear Santa, make sure that next year I know: ...” And at the end: “Best regards, Tommy”.

It is fair and an option from the reverse, when you are negatively inclined towards a person in advance because of a weak resume - you have already agreed to have an interview and it is somehow ugly to cancel. If you have agreed to communicate, then be impartial.

Speaking of sociability and a neat look, for a tester these are important, close to the necessary qualities. Whatever bug he finds, he has to explain to the developers why this is a mistake and how to reproduce it - for obvious reasons, all this should be done in a benevolent tone. You can’t do without communication skills here, because harsh criticism about the bugs found is easy to get a negative in return.

This may seem ambiguous, but I recommend not to focus on a slight lateness of the candidate for the interview, especially if he called and warned. Punctuality among engineers is not the most common quality. In addition, with a stopwatch in the morning at the entrance, no one is worth it anyway, and finding an office the first time a new person is not always easy.

I also do not like stressful interviews that are popular these days, especially for engineering positions. You are not looking for a conflict resolution manager, but a QA specialist. In his work, stress is not associated with conflicts, but with the level of responsibility for missed mistakes. Therefore, in our business it is better to do without shouting at the interview and deliberately spilled coffee - let someone from the sphere of stock trading deal with this.

# 2 Suggest to test your product.

When you hire a person to a new position for yourself and the company, it is not clear what to ask him at all. There are often two extremes:

• % candidacy_name% should be able to do everything, including administration and modeling skills of rocket engines. Just in case.

  
  
• % candidacy_name% should be a great developer.

Both options are equally terrible and generate a lot of strange and unnecessary questions, creating an unsightly image for the interviewee in the eyes of the candidate. Simply go from the real duties of man. If the tester will check for new product assemblies and look for errors in them - suggest the candidate to do just that.

Prepare a description of the product or service. If the product is too large, take that part of it, which the potential ideal candidate will deal with. It is advisable not to rise to such a level of abstraction, where there will be two large squares - a frontend or a backend - give more specifics on your system. Quite great if you ask about something that you yourself don’t understand how to test. In the end, it is not a shame to be a bit mercantile.

For example, we ask to test our small service called “Reminder” - written reminders that some payment will need to be made soon. It is convenient because it is not very clear how to test it: how to get a reminder that should arrive in a month, how to check that if the reminder is set on the 31st day of the month, then in conditional February it will come 28, not 29th.

Every tester should be at least a bit an analyst. Therefore, in interviews, we often ask people to tell how they themselves would create a product or service that they are invited to test. With the same reminder, please describe where his records would be stored (after this, even the most unsuspecting understand that where the reminders are stored, the date of the next event is also stored), which mechanism would throw alerts. If you need not a monkey clicker, but a person who is aware of his actions, then this is a good way to test him for that very “analytical mindset”.

I hope that you will not specify the "analytical mind" in the requirements for the candidate. And if indicated, do not continue reading until you correct the ad.

It is useful to ask all the same, but about the product that the tester has already tested before. Ask about the architecture, how the system was arranged. In the process, ask a couple of questions of the “why did you do that?” Format so that the person describes at least in general terms why he made such a decision. The main thing is that he does not shrug his shoulders with the words: "I know where I am from - I am a simple tester."

# 3 Check how "IT theme" he is

Imagine that you were parachuted to the center of China. No money and no phone, no knowledge of the language. The same thing will happen if you bring a person who is intelligent and in every way pleasant to talk to your team. He and the development team simply will not understand each other, and you will have to hire someone like the heroine Amy Adams from Arrival to teach the new specialist this incomprehensible avian language. Indeed, in addition to the ability to compile the right test algorithms, the tester must communicate with the development and product team in the same language.

It is convenient to attract developers from your team to such an interview - of course, they easily “overwhelm” the candidate, but you can appreciate the new person’s outlook and his general understanding of where he came from. For example, banal phrases about JIRA, Bitbucket, certificates and IDE can be a rock alphabet for quite newcomers to the profession.

If for some reason developers do not attract, then ask in the forehead: what is the Internet? What I just did not respond to this banality: from "well, this sites" and to "this is what allows you to communicate with each other." Often, people simply went deep into themselves, and after the meeting they were violently outraged that they were being asked such stupid and useless questions.

It is also important to offer the candidate to create a not particularly complicated algorithm for some kind of action or test. So you make sure that he is not the first time and he is familiar with the algorithms. To this skill, I add the ability to quickly count in my mind. Of course, this is a controversial point, but for fruitful work it is useful to be able to count the expressions from the code in your mind — without first assembling the project and the calculator.

# 4 About test tasks

I agree that the test task is akin to practice - it allows you to better assess knowledge. But usually, candidates are not eager to fulfill them, because it is long, dreary and incomprehensible whether the game is worth the candle. Yes, and inspectors do not always relate to the test in good faith. For example, they can postpone checking the results for several days (and the candidate was in a hurry, did) or check "by stencil". If the solution goes beyond the boundaries of the ideal stencil, the candidate is rejected, which is wrong. You remember the train of thought and its priority over the correct decision?

In my opinion, the test task in most cases is not necessary, but, admittedly, there are a number of justified exceptions:

• You are not looking for a junior tester, but an automator, that is, an already accomplished specialist with your career path. In this case, it may be easier to assess the claimed ownership of the technology and test experience.

  
  

• Your company has a high degree of formalism when writing numerous documents, and you need to be sure that the candidate is able to express his thoughts in writing and is not dyslexic. But in general it can be checked by giving the candidate a laptop and asking for a description of some bug.

  
  
• It is necessary to attract a lot of people to the interviews, and there is little suitable resume at first glance. There will have to go to the developers with a request to break something. Come up with bugs and release a special "leaky" assembly for the practical work of testers.

For one such task, one and a half thousand letters somehow came to us. On the second hundred reports of bugs, you fall into Zen and stop responding to external stimuli. At the same time, you can quickly learn, without registration and SMS, meditation.

# 5 What to do when the wagons demolish the planet

I made a curious observation after working in several large companies - testers often develop their careers not in the direction of development, but in the direction of project management. In essence, this is not surprising, since at the heart of both professions is the skill of communicating with people. It is also more important for a tester to maintain correctness and neutrality than to know a couple of additional programming languages.

Ask the candidate how he will deal with relatively impossible situations. Relatively - because you should not ask him what he will do when the Wagons take down his planet and why he doesn’t have a towel with him.

Examples of relevant questions:

• “Two PMAs come to you and ask you to quickly test their project, which needs to be released in the evening. What will you do?"
• “The PM went on vacation and didn’t say whether the checkmark should be ticked in the item“ yes, I want to receive every second reminders about the transfer of Neymar, ”and the developer says that he saw him in the coffin and should not check it. Should I get a bug or not? "

If we rank the quality of the candidates, then I will put the mind first with a particular fanfare, and the second place - wit. Therefore, I always ask what books the candidate read. And it does not have to be books on testing.

One of our senior testers got Yandex.Money after a letter that began with the words: “I don’t know anything about testing, but I really want to work with you.” It was three years ago, and since then he first got rid of the prefix "junior", and then got the "senior". Lesha, hello!