The Test & Delivery / Automation Pair Programming Interview

What to expect

In the pair programming session, YOU will be the star and you will be programing on your development machine while we are going to see your screen using screen-sharing and be there to assist you as work through a small project from scratch. You will have the option to choose between three projects.

1. 1. Automate searching Google for the terms “I love love love LOVE Test & Automation!” using a browser library(like Selenium) and validate the title of the results page.
2. 2. Create an automated API test to retrieve one “cat fact” from a public “cat facts” API(https://alexwohlbruck.github.io/cat-facts/) and verify that the Fact object contains the text property.
3. 3. Setup a CI/CD pipeline Travis, Jenkins, CircleCI etc, to build a skeleton npm project that can run the¬†npm run build¬†task. This project requires you to create a repo on Github, write and build npm script that outputs the sentence¬†Hello Build, setup a CI/CD systemt that’s connect to Github repo, and when code is pushed to the repo the CI/CD system runs the build task.

You will choose the language and frameworks needed for the project you selected, and you will start from an empty project and build the smallest amount of code to run the project successfully. You will be using Zoom(https://www.zoom.us/) for this exercise. If you do not already have this application downloaded on your device we recommend downloading and testing the system prior to the scheduled interview

How will you be evaluated

• Get it done:¬†How effective are you at balancing time constraints, negotiating requirements, and enabling a creative flow to meet the goal of the task.
• Creativity:¬†How do you breakdown the requirements and use the wide range of technical and non technical options to complete a task.
• Team work:¬†Do you use your pairing buddy to aid you in problem solving? Have you asked for feedback on your progress?
• Fun:¬†Do you enjoy coding? Do you enjoy solving automation tasks? Do you enjoy pairing? Do you have a funny meme to share?

Words of advice

• Be ready to code on your development machine. We’ll be screen sharing to support you and answer questions as they come up.
• Relax & have fun! We are a happy and fun bunch that like to laugh a lot.

Must read

To get an overview of the entire engineering interview process, please checkout this blog post: https://www.plastiq.com/blog/2018/09/the-engineering-interview-process/.