Curated interview practice questions with answers. These are practice scenarios, not a verified list of past interview questions.
About Quantiphi hiring for Software Testing roles
Quantiphi is an AI-first digital engineering company that builds machine learning, data engineering, cloud and applied AI solutions for enterprises. It is known for close partnerships with major cloud providers and works with clients in healthcare, banking, media and retail. In India it hires machine learning engineers, data engineers, cloud engineers and software developers for global projects.
For Software Testing roles, this Quantiphi practice set focuses most on Agile, SQL and API Testing (8), Manual Testing Basics (6), Mobile Testing (4), Database Testing (4). It has 8 easy, 28 medium, 4 hard questions, so you can start easy and work up to the harder ones.
Company type
Analytics
Headquarters
Marlborough, Massachusetts, USA
Main India offices
Mumbai, Bengaluru
Quantiphi Software Testing interview process
Online assessment (aptitude + coding + ML basics)
Technical interview 1
Technical interview 2
HR round
Typical pattern based on public candidate experiences. Rounds vary by role, team and year.
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01
You join a project in the middle of a release. How do you plan your testing?
Spend the first day learning the scope: read the release notes, user stories and test plan, and ask the lead what is at risk. Get access to the environment, tracker and test repository. Pick up a clearly defined module, run its existing test cases to learn the application and note gaps. Ask questions early in stand-up. Within a few days, take ownership of retesting and regression for that module.
Shift-left means starting testing activities earlier in the life cycle: reviewing requirements, joining design discussions and writing tests before code is complete. A defect found in requirements may cost a short conversation to fix, while the same defect found in production may need a hotfix, data correction and customer support. Testers shift left by asking questions in grooming, defining acceptance criteria and reviewing designs.
03
How do you test location-based features in a mobile app?
Test with location permission allowed, denied and approximate only. Use mock location tools to simulate different cities and moving routes. Verify the app shows nearby results correctly, updates location while moving and handles GPS turned off. Check accuracy indoors and with weak GPS, battery impact of continuous tracking and that background location is used only if needed and explained to the user.
04
Your team has 500 manual regression test cases and wants to start automating. Where do you start?
Do not automate all 500. First clean the suite: remove duplicates and outdated cases. Rank the rest by business risk, run frequency and stability. Start with a smoke set of 20 to 30 critical journeys and move rule-heavy checks to the API level. Choose a tool that fits the team's skills, build a simple framework with page objects and CI runs, then expand in batches while tracking time saved and flakiness.
WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines from the W3C, is the main standard for making web content usable by people with disabilities. The current version is WCAG 2.2. It has three conformance levels: A is the minimum, AA is the usual legal and contract target, and AAA is the highest and rarely required for a whole site. Each level adds success criteria, such as colour contrast at AA.
06
What is cold start versus warm start, and why test app launch time?
A cold start launches the app from scratch when it is not in memory, loading the process and the first screen; it is the slowest. A warm start happens when the app process exists but the screen must be recreated, and a hot start just brings it to the foreground. Users abandon slow apps, so teams set targets, such as cold start under two seconds on a mid-range device, and measure each release for regressions.
07
How do you test session management in a web application?
Check that a new session ID is created after login, and that the session expires after the defined idle time. Verify logout invalidates the session on the server, so pressing back or reusing the old cookie does not work. Check that cookies use Secure, HttpOnly and SameSite flags. Test concurrent logins if they are limited, and that changing the password ends other sessions. Session IDs must not appear in URLs.
08
What is the difference between alpha and beta testing?
Model answer: Situation: our sprints kept ending with stories stuck in testing. Task: suggest a fix in the retrospective. Action: I showed that most stories reached QA in the last two days and proposed smaller stories, early test case sharing and developers deploying to QA daily. Result: the team tried it next sprint, and the number of stories carried over dropped from five to one.
10
How do you test a mobile app when the device storage is almost full?
Fill the device storage close to the limit, then install or update the app and confirm a clear message if it cannot proceed. Inside the app, try downloads, photo capture, caching and saving drafts. The app should show a helpful error, not crash or corrupt data. Also check what happens to the local database when a write fails, and whether the app recovers after space is freed.
The pesticide paradox says that if you run the same tests again and again, they stop finding new defects, just as pests become resistant to the same pesticide. To counter it, regularly review and update test cases, add new scenarios from recent production bugs, vary test data, and mix scripted runs with exploratory sessions. Rotating testers across modules also brings fresh eyes and new ideas.
13
SQL: how do you test that a primary key rejects duplicate values?
-- Insert a row, then try the same key again; the second insert must fail
INSERT INTO users (id, email) VALUES (9001, 'a@test.com');
INSERT INTO users (id, email) VALUES (9001, 'b@test.com');
-- Expected: duplicate key or unique constraint error
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM users WHERE id = 9001;
-- Expected: 1
DELETE FROM users WHERE id = 9001;
Login is a blocker because no other testing can proceed. Confirm it quickly: retry with valid test accounts, check another browser and confirm the right environment and build number. Then log a blocker bug with steps, screenshot and console or network errors, inform the developer and lead immediately, and mark the build as rejected in smoke testing. Meanwhile, prepare test data or review test cases until a fixed build arrives.
This relies on colour alone to give information, which fails WCAG criterion 1.4.1. Users with red-green colour blindness, which affects a noticeable share of men, cannot tell the states apart, and screen readers announce nothing. Recommend adding text or icons such as a tick and a cross with labels like 'Passed' and 'Failed', and accessible names for the dots. Test with a colour blindness simulator in browser developer tools.
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.
20
A developer asks you to test a feature that has no acceptance criteria. How do you proceed?
First ask the product owner or business analyst for the expected behaviour and write down the answers as draft acceptance criteria. Meanwhile, explore the feature, compare it with similar existing features and list assumptions. Share the assumptions in the story so everyone agrees before you sign off. Raise the missing criteria in the next refinement so future stories are not picked up without them.
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.
22
What is mobile app testing and what extra checks does it need?
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.
24
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.
Send and receive text messages and check order and timestamps. Test sent, delivered and read status. Send emojis, long messages, links and attachments within and over the size limit. Check messages sent while offline are queued and delivered on reconnect. Verify blocking a user stops messages. Test notifications when the app is in background. Check chat history after reinstall or on a second device, and that deleted messages disappear for both users if supported.
26
How do you handle pressure when many bugs are found close to a release?
Model answer: Situation: two days before a release, we found 15 new bugs in checkout. Task: help the team decide what to fix. Action: I stayed calm, retested each one quickly, ranked them by user impact, and shared a clear list in triage with must-fix and can-wait items. Result: we fixed five critical bugs, released on time with documented known issues, and no critical issue reached users.
27
SQL: find orders whose total does not match the sum of their order items.
SELECT o.order_id, o.total_amount,
SUM(i.quantity * i.unit_price) AS items_total
FROM orders o
JOIN order_items i ON i.order_id = o.order_id
GROUP BY o.order_id, o.total_amount
HAVING o.total_amount <> SUM(i.quantity * i.unit_price);
28
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.
29
A CAPTCHA on the signup page blocks screen reader users. What do you recommend?
Log it as a high-severity accessibility bug because it fully blocks a group of users from signing up. An image-only CAPTCHA fails WCAG unless an alternative is offered. Recommend options such as invisible or risk-based bot checks, an email or OTP verification step, an audio alternative plus another modality, and rate limiting on the server. Retest the full signup with NVDA and TalkBack after the change.
30
Write a simple Playwright test in TypeScript that logs in and checks the dashboard heading.
Start small. Agree on a definition of ready and definition of done that include acceptance criteria and testing. Join refinement and run Three Amigos for every story. Set up a simple bug workflow and severity guide in the tracker, a shared test case repository and a smoke checklist for each build. Then add API checks and automated regression for stable flows. Review what works in each retrospective and adjust.
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.
Response time is the total time from sending a request to receiving the complete response, as the user experiences it. Latency is the delay before the first byte of the response arrives, mostly network and waiting time. Throughput is how many requests or transactions the system handles per unit of time, such as 500 requests per second. Good performance usually means low response time at the required throughput.
Save filters for common views such as my open bugs, bugs ready for retest, blockers in the current sprint and bugs by fix version. Add them to a dashboard with gadgets like pie charts by priority, created versus resolved trend and a sprint bug list. Share the dashboard with the team so status is visible without manual reports. Testers start their day from the ready-for-retest filter.
36
A report shows duplicate rows after a new release. How do you investigate in the database?
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.
37
SQL: verify that row counts and totals match between a source table and a target table after a data load.
-- Compare counts and sums side by side; both columns must match
SELECT
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM staging_orders) AS src_count,
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM dw_orders) AS tgt_count,
(SELECT SUM(amount) FROM staging_orders) AS src_amount,
(SELECT SUM(amount) FROM dw_orders) AS tgt_amount;
38
SQL: find the second highest salary from an employees table.
SELECT MAX(salary) AS second_highest
FROM employees
WHERE salary < (SELECT MAX(salary) FROM employees);
-- alternative using DENSE_RANK
SELECT DISTINCT salary FROM (
SELECT salary, DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY salary DESC) AS rnk
FROM employees
) t WHERE rnk = 2;
39
A form saves names with an apostrophe, like O'Brien, incorrectly or fails to save them. What do you test?
This suggests the input is not handled safely, possibly string-built SQL, which is also a SQL injection risk. Test names with apostrophes, double quotes, Hindi and other Unicode text, emojis, leading spaces and maximum length. Query the database to confirm the exact stored value and character encoding. Then check the value displays correctly everywhere it is read back. Log a high-severity bug and mention the possible injection risk.
A development model where each development phase has a matching testing phase, such as requirements with acceptance tests and design with integration tests.
Tips to crack the Quantiphi Software Testing interview
Revise machine learning fundamentals such as regression, classification, evaluation metrics and overfitting, with clear intuitive explanations.
Get hands-on with at least one cloud platform and mention any cloud certifications, since much client work runs on cloud services.
Prepare a deep explanation of one ML or data project, including dataset, model choice, results and deployment approach.
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; Quantiphi interviewers usually ask follow-ups on your first answer.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds are there in the Quantiphi Software Testing interview?
Candidates usually go through 4 stages: Online assessment (aptitude + coding + ML basics); Technical interview 1; Technical interview 2; HR 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 Quantiphi Software Testing interview?
This practice set leans on Agile, SQL and API Testing (8), Manual Testing Basics (6), Mobile Testing (4), Database Testing (4). Revise those first, then practise explaining one or two of your own projects end to end, because most Quantiphi interviewers ask you to walk through real work.
Are these the exact questions asked at Quantiphi?
No. These are curated practice questions that match the skills and difficulty usually tested in analytics interviews like Quantiphi's. They are not a leaked or verified list of past questions.
Where does Quantiphi hire Software Testing professionals in India?
Quantiphi has large teams in Mumbai, Bengaluru. Openings and locations change often, so check the Quantiphi careers page and filter by city and experience.