Expedia Group Automation Testing Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Expedia Group hiring for Automation Testing roles
Expedia Group is a global online travel company that owns brands such as Expedia, Hotels.com and Vrbo. Its platforms help travellers search and book hotels, flights, holiday rentals and packages, while partners use its tools to reach customers. In India it has technology centres that hire software engineers, data scientists, analysts and quality engineers for its travel platforms.
For Automation Testing roles, this Expedia Group practice set focuses most on Selenium WebDriver (6), API Testing and CI/CD (5), Cucumber and BDD (5), Selenium Grid & Docker (4). It has 2 easy, 26 medium, 12 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
Product
Headquarters
Seattle, USA
Main India offices
Gurugram, Bengaluru
Expedia Group Automation Testing interview process
Online coding assessment
Technical round 1 (DSA)
Technical round 2 (system design or domain)
Hiring manager and behavioural round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
Write a Dockerfile that runs a Maven and TestNG test suite.
Write a method that builds the locator from a parameter, for example private By rowFor(String name) { return By.xpath("//tr[td[normalize-space()='" + name + "']]"); }, and expose actions like deleteUser(name). Keep the template in the page class, not in tests. Escape quotes if names may contain them, and prefer CSS with data attributes when the application provides them.
03
How do you watch a test running inside a Docker Selenium container?
The selenium node and standalone images include a VNC server and noVNC. Expose port 7900 and open http://localhost:7900 in a browser; the default password is secret, or set SE_VNC_NO_PASSWORD to skip it. You can also open the Grid UI on port 4444 and click the session's video icon. This is very useful for debugging tests that fail only inside the container, such as layout or focus problems.
A quality gate is a rule a build must pass before moving forward, such as all smoke tests passing, code coverage above a threshold, no critical static analysis issues, or no new high-severity vulnerabilities. If the gate fails, the pipeline stops and the change is not deployed. Gates make quality an automatic decision instead of a manual check.
05
Write a docker-compose.yml that runs a Selenium hub with Chrome and Firefox nodes.
// Scrolls the first scrollable container until the text is visible
String selector = "new UiScrollable(new UiSelector().scrollable(true))"
+ ".scrollIntoView(new UiSelector().text(\"Order History\"))";
WebElement item = driver.findElement(AppiumBy.androidUIAutomator(selector));
item.click();
07
Write a REST Assured test that deserializes a response into a POJO.
Check CPU and memory usage of application servers, garbage collection pauses and heap usage for Java services, thread pool and connection pool saturation, database slow queries, locks and connection counts, disk I/O and network bandwidth. Also look at load balancer and cache hit rates and error logs. Correlate the timestamp of the slowdown with these graphs in an APM or monitoring tool to find which resource saturated first.
09
What are Cucumber Expressions and how do they differ from regular expressions?
Cucumber Expressions are the default, simpler way to match steps, using parameter types like {int}, {string}, {word} and {float}. For example "I add {int} items" captures a number and converts it to an Integer automatically. Regular expressions are still supported and offer more control, but are harder to read. Teams usually prefer Cucumber Expressions and define custom parameter types for domain values.
10
How do you record a JMeter script with the HTTP(S) Test Script Recorder?
Add the recorder from Templates using the Recording template, which also creates a Thread Group and Recording Controller. Start the recorder on port 8888, set your browser or system proxy to localhost:8888 and import the ApacheJMeterTemporaryRootCA certificate so HTTPS works. Perform the user journey, then stop. Afterwards remove static resources and third-party calls, add correlation for dynamic values, parameterize data and add think time.
11
Write Selenium code to verify that all links on a page are not broken.
Use a parallel block in the pipeline with a stage per browser, or a matrix directive with axis BROWSER values chrome, firefox and edge. Each branch runs mvn test -Dbrowser=${BROWSER}, ideally against Selenium Grid or containers so agents do not need local browsers. Publish results per branch with clear names so failures show which browser broke.
13
PageFactory with @FindBy or By locators: which do you prefer and why?
Many teams now prefer plain By locators with explicit waits. PageFactory proxies look up elements lazily, which can hide timing problems and makes StaleElementReference harder to reason about, and its AjaxElementLocatorFactory waits are less flexible. PageFactory is fine and readable for stable pages. The key is consistency across the framework and always waiting for the right condition before acting.
14
How do you use Cucumber with REST Assured for API BDD tests?
Write scenarios in business terms, such as "When a customer places an order for 2 items". In step definitions, build the request with REST Assured, store the Response in a shared scenario context, and assert in Then steps using then().statusCode() and JSON path checks. Keep base URI, auth and specs in a helper class so steps stay short and the same steps serve many features.
Code pushed to Git → Jenkins job triggers (webhook or schedule) → mvn clean test with the suite XML → reports and screenshots published → notifications on Slack/email → failures triaged before release.
Read the documented limit, then send requests quickly until you exceed it and assert a 429 Too Many Requests response with headers like Retry-After or remaining quota. Wait for the window to reset and confirm requests succeed again. Also check limits are per user or key as designed. Run these tests in isolation so they do not throttle the rest of the suite.
19
Your UI regression suite has 15 percent flaky failures. How would you bring it under control?
Measure flakiness per test over many runs and fix the worst first. Typical fixes are replacing sleeps with explicit waits, creating independent test data via API, avoiding shared logins, using stable locators, isolating parallel drivers and stubbing unstable third parties. Quarantine known flaky tests into a separate job so they do not block releases, and set a target like under 2 percent.
20
A third-party payment API is slow and makes your tests time out in CI. What do you do?
Separate concerns: for most functional tests, stub the payment API with WireMock returning success, failure and timeout responses, so tests are fast and deterministic. Keep a small set of integration tests against the sandbox, with longer timeouts and retries for network errors, run on a schedule. Report sandbox slowness separately so it does not block every pull request.
21
How do you verify response time and headers in REST Assured?
For every XPath query Appium must fetch the full page source of the app, convert it into an XML document and then evaluate the expression, which can take seconds on large screens and is even slower on iOS. Index-based XPath also breaks when layouts change. Use accessibility id first, then resource-id, Android UiAutomator selectors or iOS predicate strings and class chains, which are evaluated natively on the device and are much faster.
24
A utility method that parses dates from the UI breaks in parallel runs. What might be wrong?
It probably uses a shared static SimpleDateFormat, which is not thread-safe, so parallel threads corrupt each other's parsing. Replace it with java.time DateTimeFormatter, which is immutable and thread-safe, and LocalDate or LocalDateTime for values. Generally, avoid shared mutable static objects in test utilities that run in parallel.
25
How do you take a screenshot on failure in TestNG?
Situation: our suite had duplicated locators across 200 tests and each UI release broke many of them. Task: reduce maintenance effort. Action: I introduced page objects and components for the top ten pages, added data-testid attributes with the developers and wrote a short guide. Result: fixing a UI change went from half a day to under an hour, and new joiners wrote tests faster.
27
How do you design a REST Assured framework for many microservices?
Create a base module with shared specs, auth handling, config per environment, filters for logging and reporting, and utilities. Each service gets its own client class wrapping endpoints and POJOs for its models. Tests call clients, never raw URLs. Use builders for test data, schema checks for contracts, tags to run per service, and run independent services in parallel in CI.
28
Tell me about a time you reduced the run time of a test suite significantly.
Situation: our TestNG regression took three hours, so it only ran nightly. Task: get it under forty minutes to run on every merge. Action: I profiled slow tests, replaced UI login with an API token, made the driver ThreadLocal and enabled parallel classes, moved data setup to APIs and removed duplicate tests. Result: the suite ran in thirty-five minutes on four threads, and defects were caught on the same day they were introduced.
29
Nightly Jenkins regression runs take 4 hours. How would you bring it down?
Measure first: find the slowest tests and setup steps. Then run tests in parallel across Grid nodes or containers, replace UI setup with API calls, remove duplicate coverage, move checks down to API level, split the suite into shards across agents, and cache Maven dependencies. Aim for a smoke stage under 15 minutes on every commit and a parallel regression under an hour.
30
An element is visible in Appium Inspector but your test throws NoSuchElementException on the device. What do you check?
First check timing: the screen may still be loading, so add an explicit wait for presence. Then check context: in a hybrid app the element may be in a webview while you are in NATIVE_APP. Confirm the locator matches exactly, including package prefix in resource-id. The element may be off screen in a list, so scroll first. Also check that the Inspector session used the same app build, language and device size as the test.
31
Developers changed a field from a number to a string and your tests did not catch it. How do you prevent this?
Add JSON schema validation for key responses so type changes fail immediately, and deserialize into typed POJOs, which fail when types do not match. For services with multiple consumers, introduce contract tests so providers learn about breaks before deploying. Also ask for API changes to be shared in pull requests or a changelog that QA reviews.
32
Business stakeholders never read your feature files. Is BDD still worth it?
Partly. Readable scenarios still help testers and developers, but if nobody discusses examples before coding, Cucumber is only an extra layer over normal tests. I would first try to restart three-amigos sessions for complex stories. If the business truly will not engage, I would keep Gherkin only for key business flows and write lower-level tests in plain TestNG to reduce maintenance.
33
Write a step definition that reads a DataTable as a list of maps.
Check that endpoints reject missing or invalid tokens with 401, block users from other users' data with 403 or 404, validate input to prevent injection, do not leak stack traces or sensitive fields, enforce HTTPS and set security headers. Automate these as negative tests in the regression suite and work with the security team for deeper penetration testing.
36
Your Jenkins test stage marks the build green even though tests failed. Why?
Possibly testFailureIgnore is set to true in Surefire, the shell step uses || true, or the script swallows Maven's exit code. Sometimes tests catch exceptions and never fail. Check the console log for Maven's BUILD result and Surefire summary. Fix the configuration so failures produce a non-zero exit, or use junit publishing to mark the build unstable when tests fail.
Fluent page objects return objects from every action so a test reads like a sentence, for example new SearchPage(driver).searchFor("phone").filterByBrand("X").sortByPrice().firstResult(). It improves readability and models navigation. The risk is long chains that hide failures, so keep chains to a single journey and use clear method names that show which page you end on.
39
File upload tests pass locally but fail when they run on a remote Grid. Why?
sendKeys with a file path sends a path that exists on your test machine, but the browser runs on the remote node where that path does not exist. Set a LocalFileDetector on the RemoteWebDriver, using ((RemoteWebDriver) driver).setFileDetector(new LocalFileDetector()), so Selenium zips and transfers the file to the node first. Alternatively mount the test data folder into the node container. Always use absolute paths.
40
How do you share state between step definition classes in Cucumber Java?
Use dependency injection. With cucumber-picocontainer (or Spring/Guice), create a context class such as TestContext holding the driver, page objects and scenario data, and add it as a constructor parameter in every step class. Cucumber creates one instance per scenario and injects the same object everywhere, so state is shared within a scenario but never leaks between scenarios. Avoid static fields because they break parallel runs.
Tips to crack the Expedia Group Automation Testing interview
Practise DSA problems and be ready to discuss time and space complexity of your solutions in clear terms.
Prepare for design questions on systems like hotel search, booking or pricing, focusing on scale, caching and reliability.
Use the STAR method for behavioural questions and show curiosity about travel technology and customer experience.
Keep a one-minute story ready for every project on your CV: problem, your part, tools, result.
Practise the hard questions on this page aloud; Expedia Group interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Expedia Group Automation Testing interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online coding assessment; Technical round 1 (DSA); Technical round 2 (system design or domain); Hiring manager and behavioural round. The exact rounds change with the role, team, location and your experience, so confirm the process with the recruiter.
Which topics should I prepare for the Expedia Group Automation Testing interview?
This practice set leans on Selenium WebDriver (6), API Testing and CI/CD (5), Cucumber and BDD (5), Selenium Grid & Docker (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Expedia Group interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Expedia Group?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in product interviews like Expedia Group's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Expedia Group hire Automation Testing professionals in India?
Expedia Group has large teams in Gurugram, Bengaluru. Openings and locations change often, so check the Expedia Group careers page and filter by city and experience.
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