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I know some of you on this list have hired agile testers. Did you ask any interview questions that you felt helped show if the candidate had the right skills and mindset to be valuable on your agile team?
I've had lots of experience being an agile tester, but no experience hiring one. I have gotten good ideas from this list and from the workshops on agile testing at ADC 2004, but I'm not sure what specific interview questions might be helpful.
Our job posting (which was on this list) has requirements specific to agile. I have been shocked how few respondents (not from this list, but from local job lists) even bothered to read the posting. The main requirement, in my mind, is a great enthusiasm to try agile development, and the right sort of mindset to collaborate with developers and business experts. If they have any sort of technical background, they can easily learn to use our tools, but I don't know how to teach soft skills.
For phone screening, I am asking questions like these, to try to get an idea how enthusiastic they are about agile development and how they work:
-- Had you heard of agile development before? Have you learned anything about it?
-- If you were given a one sentence description of a feature that needs to be developed, such as this, how would you go about fleshing out the requirements?
“As a user of an online retail shopping website, I need a way to delete items out of my shopping cart so that I don’t have to purchase items I didn’t want.”
-- What are some of the steps you go through in trying to narrow down a problem? For example: Error reports are coming in for the login page. What would you do to try to investigate?
Does anyone have suggestions of questions that helped them identify good candidates?
Thanks,
Lisa
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Lisa Crispin
Co-author,
Testing Extreme Programming
http://lisa.crispin.home.att.net
Lisa Crispin
Co-author,
Testing Extreme Programming
http://lisa.crispin.home.att.net
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