Testing, Quality & Reliability Topics
Quality assurance, testing methodologies, test automation, and reliability engineering. Includes QA frameworks, accessibility testing, quality metrics, and incident response from a reliability/engineering perspective. Covers testing strategies, risk-based testing, test case development, UAT, and quality transformations. Excludes operational incident management at scale (see 'Enterprise Operations & Incident Management').
Code Quality and Debugging Practices
Focuses on writing maintainable, readable, and robust code together with practical debugging approaches. Candidates should demonstrate principles of clean code such as meaningful naming, clear function and module boundaries, avoidance of magic numbers, single responsibility and separation of concerns, and sensible organization and commenting. Include practices for catching and preventing bugs: mental and unit testing of edge cases, assertions and input validation, structured error handling, logging for observability, and use of static analysis and linters. Describe debugging workflows for finding and fixing defects in your own code including reproducing failures, minimizing test cases, bisecting changes, using tests and instrumentation, and collaborating with peers through code reviews and pair debugging. Emphasize refactoring, test driven development, and continuous improvements that reduce defect surface and make future debugging easier.
Automation Testing and Debugging
Focuses on methods and tooling for testing and debugging automated scripts and applications across environments and layers. Includes diagnosing flaky tests, analyzing test failures, reading and interpreting logs, setting breakpoints, using browser developer tools, capturing screenshots and video recordings, and using remote debugging approaches. Covers systematic root cause analysis to determine whether failures stem from test code, application code, environment or infrastructure, and strategies for isolating problems such as component level testing and reproducible minimal examples. Addresses cross layer troubleshooting across frontend, application programming interface, database and network components as well as platform specific testing considerations such as emulator versus real device behavior and mobile device operating system differences. Also includes best practices for test design, logging and monitoring, making test failures actionable for developers, and troubleshooting automation within continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines and shared environments.