Common Selenium interview question with answers can be found on this site. Being Senior QA Tester, I started to put together and continuously update interview question for Selenium test automation tool. These questions were asked during real QA interviews for Selenium QA Automation Engineer position in the leading companies. I believe that any QA Engineer, no matter seasoned one or novice one, would greatly benefits from this collection Selenium interview questions and tips. If you are plan to attend an interview you need to know the answers on these Selenium questions by heart. I provided answers on several technical interview questions, but you have to think how you would personally answer these questions. Finally, I would ask anyone of you to provide answers on unanswered Selenium interview question, so we all would benefit from this knowledge sharing and it would help us to land on Selenium QA Automation Engineer job and work successfully. If you were asked the interview question that is not in the list, post it with your answer.

Testing Ajax application with Selenium

Testing Ajax with Selenium is one the best Selenium interview question. This question helps interviewers distinguish between candidates with real Selenium experience, and testers who need a bit more cultivation. Ajax, an acronym for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive and more responsive web applications. The Ajax application works more like a desktop application, meaning that user’s request will not cause an entire page to reload every time, the web browser makes an asynchronous call to the web server to obtain the required data and update only specific parts of the current web page. As result the user gets more interactive, speedy, and usable web pages, but testing AJAX with Selenium will be challenging. Selenium's 'assert' and 'verify' commands might occasionally fail thanks to the asynchronous nature of the Ajax. It may happened that the result doesn't come back from the server immediately and while 'assert' and 'verify' commands already trying to verify a new value immediately.

Obviously some not very experienced Selenium testers would recommend to add a 'pause' command for a few seconds before the verification. Technically Test Manger could stop the testing interview after this answer and start working with the next candidate for position. The 'pause' suggestion may work in certain cases, because Ajax call may be not completed after pausing for a specific time due to slow machines or network. If the tester set the long pause time it will make the test unacceptably slow and drastically increase testing time.

QA Manager should pick the tester who recommends to use waitForCondition function in Selenium for Ajax testing. The waitForCondition command evaluates a JavaScript snippet repeatedly, until the snippet returns true. As soon as Selenium detects that the condition returns true, it will stop waiting and Ajax testing will resume.

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