Automation Testing Interview Questions for Banking & finance Companies
40 questions weighted to the interview style of banking & finance companies — 5 easy, 32 medium, 3 hard.
How banking & finance companies interview for Automation Testing
Banks and financial-services firms hire for technology, analytics and QA in their global capability centres. Interviews mix technical rounds with domain questions on banking products, regulation, data quality and risk, and they value process discipline.
This set focuses on Selenium WebDriver (7), API Testing and CI/CD (6), TestNG Framework (6), Page Object Model (5).
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01
What are the standalone, hub and node, and distributed modes of Selenium Grid 4?
Standalone runs every Grid component and a local node in a single process, which suits a laptop or a single container. Hub and node mode runs the router, distributor, queue and session map together as the hub, with separate node processes registering to it, which is the usual team setup. Fully distributed mode runs each component separately, often on Kubernetes, for very large grids that need independent scaling and high availability.
02
How do you handle dynamic elements whose ids change?
Scenario Outline: Login with different users
Given the user is on the login page
When the user logs in with "<username>" and "<password>"
Then the message "<message>" is shown
Examples:
| username | password | message |
| asha | Valid@1 | Welcome Asha |
| asha | wrong | Invalid password |
| locked1 | Valid@1 | Account is locked |
04
How do you test an API that depends on another service that is down?
A steady rise under constant load usually indicates a resource leak, such as memory not being freed, growing caches, unclosed database connections or threads, or log and temp files filling disk. Check heap usage and garbage collection trends, connection pool counts and open file handles over time. A heap dump comparison can show which objects grow. Share the evidence with developers, since such issues rarely appear in short tests.
06
What is the difference between getText() and getAttribute()?
Use a tool such as WireMock or MockServer to run a stub server that returns predefined responses for given requests. Point the application or tests to the stub with configuration. This lets you test error codes, timeouts and edge cases that are hard to trigger on the real service, and keeps tests stable when the third party is down. Still keep a few tests against the real integration.
08
How do you validate a JSON response in REST Assured?
TestNG has built-in groups, dependencies, suite XML, DataProvider and flexible parallel options, which suit large Selenium suites. JUnit 5 has a modular platform, tags, parameterized tests, extensions and strong IDE and tool support, and is the default for Spring and Cucumber's JUnit Platform engine. Both are capable; the choice usually follows team standards and existing frameworks.
10
Should page objects use inheritance or composition?
Use a shallow inheritance only for a BasePage with common helpers. For shared UI parts, use composition: a page has a Header, a SideMenu and a Table component. Deep inheritance like BasePage to ListPage to ProductListPage to SaleProductListPage becomes fragile and hard to debug. Composition mirrors how modern UIs are built from components and keeps classes small.
11
What is the difference between an array and an ArrayList?
Create a ModalComponent class scoped to the modal root element, with methods like title(), confirm() and cancel(). Pages that open modals return the component, such as cartPage.removeItem() returning ConfirmModal. The component waits for itself to appear and disappear. This keeps modal logic in one place and avoids copying locators into every page.
13
What is API testing and why is it done before UI testing?
API testing checks the business logic layer directly by sending requests and validating responses, status codes, data and errors. It is faster, more stable and cheaper to maintain than UI tests, and it can start as soon as endpoints exist, before the UI is ready. Most functional rules should be covered at API level, leaving UI tests for key user journeys.
// 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();
16
Tell me about a time a flaky test cost your team time and how you fixed it permanently.
Situation: a checkout test failed about one run in five and the team started ignoring red builds. Task: fix the root cause, not just rerun it. Action: I added logs and screenshots, found it raced with an async price recalculation, replaced a fixed sleep with a wait on the updated total and asked developers for a loading flag. Result: zero failures in the next sixty runs, and the team trusted red builds again.
17
Your helper catches Exception and prints the stack trace, and tests pass even when steps fail. What is the issue?
Swallowing exceptions hides failures, so TestNG never sees an error and marks the test passed. Catch only specific exceptions you can handle, add context and rethrow, or let them propagate. If you need logging, log and then throw. Code reviews should flag empty catch blocks and broad catch (Exception e) in test code.
@DataProvider returns Object[][]; a @Test(dataProvider = "name") method runs once per row — the basis of data-driven tests, often reading Excel or JSON.
Lambdas are short anonymous functions; streams process collections declaratively with filter, map and collect, for example filtering link text from a list of elements.
21
Write a BasePage helper that clicks an element after waiting for it to be clickable.
methods runs each @Test method in its own thread, giving the most parallelism but requiring fully independent tests and thread-safe drivers. classes runs all methods of one class in the same thread, with different classes in parallel. tests runs each <test> tag in parallel, often used to run different browsers. instances is also available for factory instances. thread-count sets the pool size.
git stash saves uncommitted changes and cleans the working directory so you can switch branches. Later, git stash pop reapplies them. Use it when you are halfway through a change and must quickly fix something on another branch. git stash list shows saved stashes, and git stash push -m "msg" names them. For longer work, a temporary commit on a branch is clearer.
25
How do you handle authentication types in REST Assured?
Basic auth uses auth().preemptive().basic(user, pass). Bearer tokens are set as a header: header("Authorization", "Bearer " + token). OAuth 2.0 can use auth().oauth2(token) after fetching the token from the token endpoint. API keys go in a header or query param. Fetch tokens once per suite or cache them with an expiry check rather than logging in before every test.
26
What is the difference between driver.close() and driver.quit()?
String parent = driver.getWindowHandle();
for (String h : driver.getWindowHandles())
if (!h.equals(parent)) driver.switchTo().window(h);
// ...then switch back to parent
29
Describe a time you improved the maintainability of an automation framework.
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.
Schedule the job, spin up environments or containers, run suites in parallel, store reports and screenshots, notify failures on Slack or email and track trends.
32
How do you start a standalone Chrome container and run your tests against it?
Run docker run -d -p 4444:4444 -p 7900:7900 --shm-size=2g selenium/standalone-chrome:latest, preferably with a pinned version tag instead of latest. It starts a mini Grid with one Chrome node. Point RemoteWebDriver to http://localhost:4444 with ChromeOptions and the tests run inside the container. Port 7900 lets you watch through noVNC. Stop it with docker stop when finished, or use --rm so it is removed automatically.
// In the Thread Group fields use property functions with defaults
Number of Threads: ${__P(users,10)}
Ramp-up period: ${__P(rampup,30)}
Duration (seconds): ${__P(duration,300)}
// Then override them when running
jmeter -n -t load.jmx -l out.jtl -Jusers=200 -Jrampup=120 -Jduration=1800
35
How do you verify that an element is displayed, enabled or selected?
Call the first page, check page size, total count and the next link or cursor. Loop through pages until there is no next page, collecting IDs, then assert no duplicates and the total matches the reported count. Also test edge cases: page 0, a page beyond the last, invalid page size and sorting stability. Cap the loop to avoid endless runs if the API misbehaves.
38
During a load test response times rise sharply. Which server-side metrics do you check?
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.
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.
How are Automation Testing interviews at banking & finance companies different?
Banks and financial-services firms hire for technology, analytics and QA in their global capability centres. Interviews mix technical rounds with domain questions on banking products, regulation, data quality and risk, and they value process discipline.
Which banking & finance companies are covered?
This page links to 18 banking & finance companies, including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, HSBC, American Express, Wells Fargo, Citi. Each has its own page with rounds and a separate practice set.
What rounds should I expect?
Common rounds at these companies include: HR round; Managerial round; Technical round; Hiring manager round; Online assessment (aptitude + technical). The exact process varies by company and role.