Morgan Stanley Software Testing Interview Questions & Answers

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

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

New → Assigned → Open → Fixed → Retest → Verified → Closed, with Reopened, Rejected, Deferred and Duplicate as side paths.

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.

Moves to the chosen floor, doors open and close, door sensor stops closing on obstruction, overload alarm, emergency button, behaviour in a power cut, max capacity and the floor display.

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

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).

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

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

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

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

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

Test execution rate, pass percentage, defect density, defect leakage, defect rejection ratio, requirement coverage and automation coverage.

Evaluating software to find defects and confirm it meets requirements. It reduces risk, protects users and saves the cost of fixing bugs after release.

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

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

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

DELETE removes selected rows and can be rolled back; TRUNCATE quickly removes all rows and resets the table.

Risk-based testing: cover critical user flows, recent changes and high-defect areas first. Clearly communicate the untested risks and get stakeholder sign-off.

A defect that stops testing or release of a feature because no workaround exists, so it is highest priority.

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

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

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.

The number of defects per size of software, for example defects per thousand lines of code or per module, used to compare quality.

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

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.

Unit, integration, system and acceptance testing, moving from individual components to the complete product in front of users.

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

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.

An API style using HTTP methods on resources identified by URLs, usually exchanging JSON and staying stateless.

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

Designing tests from user flows described in use cases to verify complete real-world interactions.

Measuring speed and stability: load (expected users), stress (beyond limits), spike (sudden surge), endurance (long duration) and scalability testing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Code is built and tested automatically on each change; tests are quality gates that stop faulty builds from moving forward.

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

Check access with valid, expired and missing tokens, role-based permissions, error codes and that sensitive data is never exposed.

A final document summarising what was tested, defects found and open, metrics, lessons learned and the recommendation for release.

Use mocks or stubs from the API contract such as Swagger, write test cases early and validate again when the real service is available.

A bug is behaviour that deviates from agreed requirements; an enhancement is a new or improved capability beyond the current requirements.

Testing how a system moves between states based on events, for example an order going from placed to paid to shipped to delivered.

JIRA Query Language, used to search issues, for example project = ABC AND status = Open AND priority = High.

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

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

Success, failure and pending flows, timeouts, refunds, double-click payments, every method (UPI, cards, net banking), rounding, security (no card data stored) and reconciliation with bank reports.

Test on real devices and OS versions, interrupts such as calls, battery, network changes, gestures, permissions and app store guidelines.

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

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.

Entry criteria are conditions that must be met to start testing (build ready, environment set); exit criteria define when testing can stop (pass rate, no critical defects).

Defects found after release that testing should have caught; leakage % = defects in production / total defects x 100.

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

Severity = impact on the system. Priority = urgency to fix. Logo misspelt on the homepage → low severity, high priority. Crash in a rarely used report → high severity, low priority.

Finding why a defect was introduced, such as unclear requirements or missed reviews, to prevent similar defects in future.

Scope (in and out), objectives, approach, environments, schedule, roles, entry/exit criteria, risks and mitigation, deliverables and tools.

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

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

A development model where each development phase has a matching testing phase, such as requirements with acceptance tests and design with integration tests.