Ola Software Testing Interview Questions & Answers
Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Ola hiring for Software Testing roles
Ola, operated by ANI Technologies, is an Indian ride-hailing platform offering cabs, auto-rickshaws and bike taxis, and it is part of a group that also includes Ola Electric and Krutrim. Its technology and analytics teams work on pricing, dispatch, maps and driver supply. It hires for software engineers, SDETs, business analysts and data scientists.
For Software Testing roles, this Ola practice set focuses most on Agile, SQL and API Testing (8), STLC and Test Planning (6), Performance and Security Basics (5), Testing Types (5). It has 26 medium, 14 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
Product
Headquarters
Bengaluru, India
Main India offices
Bengaluru
Ola Software Testing interview process
Online coding assessment
Technical round 1 (DSA)
Technical round 2 (design or case)
Hiring manager round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
Solved for OlaStart practicing
3 QUESTIONS FREESign up to unlock the full question bank and track your progress.Unlock every question and answer, then continue practising company-wise and package-wise.
Three Amigos is a short meeting where a business person or product owner, a developer and a tester discuss a story before development. The business explains the need, the developer considers how to build it and the tester asks what could go wrong and how it will be verified. The output is clear acceptance criteria and example scenarios. It prevents misunderstandings and reduces bugs found late.
02
A page loads slowly only for some users. How do you investigate as a manual tester?
Collect details from affected users: location, device, browser, network and time. Try to reproduce with similar conditions using browser network throttling. Use the browser developer tools network tab to find slow requests, large files or failing calls, and compare with a fast user. Check whether those users have more data, like a long order history. Share the slow request, timing and conditions in the bug for the developers.
In sprint planning, review each story's acceptance criteria and estimate test effort, including test data and regression. Write test cases in the first days while development starts. Ask for early builds so testing is spread across the sprint, not crowded at the end. Keep time for regression and bug retesting in the last two or three days. Track progress on the board and raise risks in stand-up.
Use the platform's sandbox or test accounts so no real money is charged. Test a successful purchase, cancellation, payment failure, pending payment, refund and restoring purchases on a new device. For subscriptions, test free trial, renewal, upgrade, downgrade, expiry and grace period, often with shortened test durations. Verify the server records the purchase and unlocks features, and that killing the app mid-purchase does not lose it.
Backward compatibility testing checks that a new version still works with older versions of things it depends on or that depend on it. Examples: a new app version opens files and data created by the old one, a new API version still serves older mobile app versions that users have not updated, and an upgraded database keeps old records readable. It prevents breaking existing users when only some parts of the system are upgraded.
08
How do you verify database schema changes in a new release?
Get the migration script or change list. Compare the schema before and after: new tables and columns, data types, lengths, default values, NULL rules, indexes and constraints. Check that existing data was migrated correctly, for example a new status column filled for old rows. Run the main app flows to confirm queries still work. Finally, confirm the rollback script works on a copy, so the release can be reversed safely.
09
How would you add basic security testing to a team that has no security process?
Start with low-cost steps. Add an OWASP-based security checklist to the definition of done for stories touching login, payments or personal data. Train testers on access control, injection and session checks. Add automated dependency and vulnerability scans to the CI pipeline. Include negative authorization tests in API suites. Arrange a penetration test before major releases and track security bugs separately with clear severity rules.
10
How do you decide testing is complete when some bugs are still open?
Testing is complete when agreed exit criteria are met, not when the bug count is zero. Check that planned tests ran, critical and high bugs are fixed or formally accepted, and remaining open bugs have workarounds and low user impact. Present the list with risk to the product owner, who decides on release. Record accepted bugs as known issues, so nothing is hidden and they are planned for a later release.
Cross-site request forgery tricks a logged-in user's browser into sending an unwanted request to a site, such as changing their email, because the browser automatically includes cookies. Prevention includes anti-CSRF tokens in forms, SameSite cookie settings and re-authentication for sensitive actions. Testers check that state-changing requests fail when the token is missing or reused, and that such actions are not done through GET requests.
12
How do specification-based techniques differ from experience-based techniques?
Specification-based (black box) techniques derive tests systematically from requirements: equivalence partitioning, boundary values, decision tables, state transitions and use cases. They give measurable coverage. Experience-based techniques rely on the tester's knowledge and intuition: error guessing, exploratory testing and checklist-based testing. They are good at finding defects the specification never mentioned. Strong testers use specification techniques for coverage and experience techniques to fill the gaps.
Ask the developer which code, services and database tables changed. Map them to impacted flows: all payment methods, refunds, partial payments, failed payment retries, invoices and order status updates. Add high-risk areas from past defects and anything that calls the same service. Run full payment regression because the business risk is high, plus a smoke test of the rest of the application before release.
Find the documented limit, for example 100 requests per minute per key. Send requests just below and above the limit and check that extra requests get 429 Too Many Requests with a Retry-After header. Verify the counter resets after the window and that limits apply per key or per IP as designed. Check that one user hitting the limit does not block others, and that normal traffic is not throttled.
16
What is JMeter and what does a basic test plan in it contain?
Apache JMeter is an open-source load testing tool, mainly for HTTP APIs and web pages. A basic test plan has a Thread Group that sets the number of virtual users, ramp-up time and loop count; samplers such as HTTP Requests; config elements like headers and CSV data; timers for think time; assertions on responses; and listeners or reports showing response times, throughput and errors. Run real load in non-GUI mode.
Android phone makers ship their own skins and settings on top of Android, so the same app can behave differently. Common problems are aggressive battery savers that kill background tasks and delay notifications, different permission screens, custom fonts and display scaling, camera differences and modified WebViews. Pick devices from the brands most used by your audience and test background work, notifications, camera and layout on each.
19
How do you test touch target size and gestures for accessibility in a mobile app?
Check that buttons and icons are large enough to tap without hitting neighbours: Android guidance is 48 by 48 dp and iOS is 44 by 44 points. Test with large font settings and one-handed use. Any action using complex gestures, such as swipe to delete or pinch, must have a simple tap alternative. Then turn on TalkBack and VoiceOver and confirm each control can be focused, named and activated.
20
Write test cases for a coupon code field at checkout.
Apply a valid coupon and check the discount and final amount. Test invalid, expired and not-yet-active coupons. Check minimum order value, maximum discount cap and category restrictions. Verify one-time-use coupons cannot be reused and that only one coupon applies if stacking is not allowed. Check case sensitivity and leading or trailing spaces. Remove the coupon and confirm the total resets. Change cart items after applying and verify the discount is recalculated.
21
What is defect prevention and what practical techniques does a QA team use?
Defect prevention focuses on stopping defects from being introduced instead of only finding them. Practical techniques include requirement reviews and clear acceptance criteria, Three Amigos sessions, design and code reviews, unit testing standards, coding checklists from past bugs, root cause analysis of escaped defects, and training on common mistakes. Track whether repeated defect types fall over time to prove the effort works.
Scalability testing checks how well the system handles growing load by adding resources, such as more servers or bigger machines, and whether performance improves in proportion. For example, if two servers handle 1,000 users, do four servers handle about 2,000 at the same response time? It finds limits that resources cannot fix, such as a single database bottleneck, and helps plan capacity for future growth.
-- Business rule: at most one ACTIVE subscription per user
SELECT user_id, COUNT(*) AS active_count
FROM subscriptions
WHERE status = 'ACTIVE'
GROUP BY user_id
HAVING COUNT(*) > 1;
-- Expected result: no rows
25
A feature passed all your test cases, but users say it is confusing. What went wrong?
The tests verified the specification but did not validate the user experience. The test cases probably checked only functional outcomes and missed usability: unclear labels, too many steps or poor error messages. Next time, add usability heuristics to reviews, do exploratory sessions as a real user persona and involve users in UAT or demos. Log the current feedback as improvement items with clear examples.
26
Explain three-point estimation for testing with an example.
Three-point estimation uses an optimistic (O), most likely (M) and pessimistic (P) estimate for each task. The weighted formula is (O + 4M + P) divided by 6. If testing a module would take 4 days at best, 6 days most likely and 14 days at worst, the estimate is (4 + 24 + 14) / 6 = 7 days. It includes uncertainty in a single number and is often combined with a work breakdown of test activities.
Contract testing checks that a service provider and its consumers agree on the API format, such as request fields, response fields and status codes, without running a full end-to-end environment. The consumer defines what it expects, and the provider's build verifies it still meets that contract. It catches breaking changes early in microservice systems, where full integration environments are slow and fragile.
Visual regression testing takes screenshots of pages or components and compares them with approved baseline images to detect unexpected layout, font, colour or spacing changes that functional assertions miss. When a difference crosses a threshold, a person reviews it and either accepts the new baseline or logs a bug. Dynamic content like dates and ads must be masked, and the same browser and screen size must be used to avoid noise.
Spend five minutes understanding its purpose and main user flows. Then run a quick smoke check of the main flow end to end, test key inputs with valid, invalid and boundary values, check links, buttons and error messages, and try the page on a second browser and a mobile width. Keep short notes and take screenshots as you go. Report the top issues by risk at the end, not every small cosmetic point.
31
What is a sprint planning meeting and what does QA contribute?
Run the report query with GROUP BY on the business key and HAVING COUNT(*) > 1 to find which records repeat. Then check whether the duplicates exist in the base table or are created by the query, usually a new join to a one-to-many table such as addresses. Compare the query before and after the release. Include the duplicate keys, the count and the suspected join in the bug report.
33
How do you do cross-browser testing and choose which browsers to cover?
Use analytics to pick browsers and versions that most real users have, plus the ones listed in the requirement, usually the latest two versions of major desktop and mobile browsers. Run the main flows on each and check layout, fonts, forms, date pickers, file upload and JavaScript errors in the console. Use responsive mode for screen sizes, and real devices or a cloud device lab for mobile browsers.
34
How do you convert existing manual test cases into automated scripts?
Pick a small set of stable, high-value regression cases first. Review each one: make steps precise, remove judgement-based checks and define clear expected results. Prepare test data that the script can create and clean up. Build reusable page objects and helpers for common steps like login. Automate, run several times to confirm stability, then link each script to its manual case ID and mark the manual case as automated.
35
How do you manage testing for multiple projects with competing deadlines?
Model answer: Situation: I was supporting two products whose releases fell in the same week. Task: deliver both without dropping quality. Action: I listed tasks by release date and risk, agreed priorities with both leads, blocked focus time for each product and shared daily status. I also asked a teammate to take retesting on one project. Result: both releases went out on time with no critical escapes.
36
The product team wants to skip UAT to ship faster. What do you advise?
Explain the risk: system testing proves the software matches the specification, but only users confirm it fits real business work. Propose a lighter option instead of none: a short, focused UAT on critical flows with two or three key users, or a staged rollout to a small user group with monitoring and quick rollback. If they still skip it, record the decision and the accepted risks with the product owner.
37
What is network condition testing for mobile apps?
It checks app behaviour on different networks: Wi-Fi, 4G, 5G, slow 2G or 3G, high latency, packet loss and no network. Also test switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data in the middle of an action, and airplane mode. The app should show loaders and clear offline messages, retry safely without duplicate actions and not freeze. Network throttling tools in developer options or proxy tools help simulate these conditions.
SELECT c.id, c.name, COUNT(o.id) AS order_count
FROM customers c
JOIN orders o ON o.customer_id = c.id
WHERE o.order_date >= CURRENT_DATE - INTERVAL '30' DAY
GROUP BY c.id, c.name
HAVING COUNT(o.id) > 3
ORDER BY order_count DESC;
Tips to crack the Ola Software Testing interview
Prepare marketplace cases on driver supply, rider demand and surge pricing in Indian cities.
Practise DSA problems on graphs and heaps, which relate to dispatch and route optimisation.
Read about Ola Maps and Krutrim AI efforts, which are recent technology focus areas for the group.
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; Ola interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Ola Software Testing interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online coding assessment; Technical round 1 (DSA); Technical round 2 (design or case); Hiring manager 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 Ola Software Testing interview?
This practice set leans on Agile, SQL and API Testing (8), STLC and Test Planning (6), Performance and Security Basics (5), Testing Types (5). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Ola interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Ola?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in product interviews like Ola's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Ola hire Software Testing professionals in India?
Ola has large teams in Bengaluru. Openings and locations change often, so check the Ola careers page and filter by city and experience.