Mastercard Software Testing Interview Questions & Answers

INNER returns matching rows, LEFT keeps all left rows, RIGHT keeps all right rows and FULL keeps all rows from both tables.

A shared checklist for when a story is complete, usually including code review, tests passing, no open critical bugs and documentation updated.

The team selects stories for the sprint. QA helps estimate testing effort, clarifies acceptance criteria and flags dependencies and risks.

Keep tests modular, prioritise by risk, use exploratory testing, automate stable parts and keep close contact with product owners.

A language to query databases. Testers use it to verify data saved by the application, prepare test data and check backend results.

A regular review where QA, development and product assess new bugs and decide severity, priority, owner and target release.

Assess impact and risk, discuss with product and dev, decide to fix, defer with a workaround or delay release, and document the decision.

A scenario is a high-level thing to test (user logs in); test cases are the detailed steps and data that verify it.

Verification: are we building the product right? (reviews, walkthroughs — no code run). Validation: are we building the right product? (actual testing against user needs).

Verify inserted, updated and deleted rows match UI actions, check constraints, duplicates, NULLs and totals with COUNT and SUM queries.

Add, remove, update quantity, price and tax calculation, coupon codes, stock limits, cart persistence after login and checkout navigation.

The hardware, software, data and configuration where testing happens, set up to mirror production as closely as practical.

Testing services directly without the UI, checking status codes, responses, security and performance. It finds issues early and is faster than UI tests.

Checking the application works across browsers, devices, operating systems, screen sizes and network conditions.

Valid card and PIN, wrong PIN, three failed attempts, amount above balance, amount above daily limit, invalid denomination, machine out of cash, network failure and receipt printing.

Black box tests behaviour without code knowledge; white box tests internal logic and paths; grey box uses partial knowledge of the internals.

Valid login, wrong password, empty fields, case sensitivity, max length, SQL-injection strings, password masking, 'remember me', lock-out after N attempts and the forgot-password link.

Check SQL injection, brute-force lockout, password masking, session timeout, HTTPS, cookie flags, error messages not revealing users and password reset flow.

The inputs used in tests. Prepare using valid, invalid and boundary values from production-like but masked data, spreadsheets or generators.

Testing that is continuous and collaborative within each sprint, with testers working alongside developers and product owners from the start.

Learning, test design and execution at the same time, without scripted cases — time-boxed sessions with a charter (e.g. 'explore checkout with coupons'), noting bugs and ideas. Great for finding edge cases.

State the problem, location and condition briefly, for example 'Checkout button disabled after applying a coupon on the cart page'.

Clear, concise, independent, repeatable, traceable to a requirement, with precise expected results and tested data.

Re-testing existing features after a change. Automate stable, repetitive, high-value flows that run every release.

Basic operations, division by zero, decimals, large numbers, order of operations, clear and backspace, repeated operations and memory keys.

Internationalisation tests that the product can support many languages and formats; localisation tests that a specific locale is correct for text, currency, date and layout.

Re-check the requirement, reproduce with clear steps and evidence (screenshots, logs), discuss with the BA/PO and record the final decision.

They let testers verify totals and counts per category, such as the number of orders per customer, and compare them with the UI or reports.

Statuses like To Do, In Progress, In Review, Ready for QA, Done and Reopened, with transitions that depend on the team's configuration.

Using experience to guess where defects likely hide, such as empty fields, special characters or unexpected sequences, and designing tests for them.

Break the work into modules and test cases, use past velocity or three-point estimation (optimistic, likely, pessimistic), add time for test data, environment issues, retesting and regression, and keep a risk buffer.

A document defining scope, approach, resources, schedule, entry and exit criteria, risks and deliverables of testing.

Positive cases use valid inputs to confirm expected behaviour; negative cases use invalid inputs to confirm the system handles errors gracefully.

Shift left with early reviews, improve test design, automate regression, use better test data, add monitoring and learn from escaped defects.

A human error causes a defect in the code, and when that defect is executed it produces a failure visible to users.

Sprint planning (estimate test effort), daily stand-up (status and blockers), sprint review (demo) and retrospective (improve). Testers clarify acceptance criteria early and test within the sprint.

Severity is impact on the system; priority is urgency of the fix. A crash in a rare report is high severity, low priority; a spelling mistake in the logo is low severity, high priority.

Peer review for clarity, coverage of requirements, correct expected results, test data and traceability, then update and baseline them.

Smoke tests run on every build for quick feedback; full regression runs less often, such as nightly or before release.

Send page, size, sort and filter parameters, then verify counts, order, boundaries (first, last, empty page) and invalid parameter handling.

Reproduce and assess impact, inform stakeholders, help developers fix and verify in staging, run regression and check monitoring after the hotfix, then do a post-mortem.

Functional testing checks what the system does (login, checkout). Non-functional testing checks how well it does it (performance, security, usability, compatibility).

By business criticality, usage frequency, defect history, risk and dependencies, running high-priority cases first.

Allowed and disallowed formats, size limits, empty file, duplicate names, special-character names, cancel upload, slow network and multiple files.

A clear title, steps to reproduce, expected vs actual result, environment/build, severity and priority, and evidence (screenshot, video, logs).

Test 17, 18, 19, 59, 60 and 61.

The observation that a small number of modules contain most defects, so testing should focus on those areas.

A set of steps with inputs and expected results. Components: ID, title, preconditions, steps, test data, expected result, actual result and status.

Testing shows presence of defects, exhaustive testing is impossible, test early, defects cluster, the pesticide paradox, testing is context-dependent and absence-of-errors is a fallacy.

For a field accepting 1–100: valid class 1–100 (test 50), invalid below 1 (test −5), invalid above 100 (test 150). One value represents each class.

A grid mapping requirements to test cases and defects, proving every requirement is tested.

User Acceptance Testing — end users or the client verify that the system meets business needs in a production-like environment before go-live.

Create a request with method, URL, headers and body, send it, check status and body, add test scripts and save it in a collection.

Valid login, invalid login, forgot password, locked account and session handling are the main scenarios to cover.

Smoke testing checks that the critical features of a new build work (broad and shallow). Sanity testing checks that a specific fix or area works after a change (narrow and deep).

An urgent patch released outside the normal schedule to fix a critical production defect, followed by regression testing and merge back to the main branch.

Re-check environment, data, browser and steps; check the logs; try the reporter's setup; add video and console logs; mark it 'cannot reproduce' only after discussing with the developer, and keep monitoring.

Static testing reviews documents and code without executing; dynamic testing executes the software to observe behaviour.

Alpha is done in-house by internal teams before release; beta is done by a limited group of real users in their own environment.

A team meeting at the end of a sprint to discuss what went well, what did not and what to improve next.