Plan QA testing for a new feature
Company: TikTok
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Technical Screen
## Scenario
You are the QA/Test Lead for a social app’s **Friends** page. A new feature is being added (e.g., new friend recommendation module, new friend request flow, new filtering/sorting, etc.). Your team must test it and ship it safely.
## Questions
1. **Task allocation:** How would you split and assign testing work across QA engineers (and coordinate with dev/PM)?
2. **Test types:** Besides testing the new feature’s happy path, what other categories of testing should be done (e.g., regression, security, performance)?
3. **Safe release:** How would you ensure the feature is released **safely** and can be used successfully in production (gates, rollout, monitoring)?
4. **Defect workflow:** As QA, how do you **reproduce and localize** a bug, and what steps happen between bug discovery and release?
5. **Automation:** What is an automated testing framework? Which layers would you automate vs keep manual?
6. **Test cases:** Provide representative test cases for the new Friends-page feature (include edge cases and negative cases).
Quick Answer: This question evaluates competency in QA test planning, test strategy and prioritization, cross-functional coordination with development and product, defect triage and localization, and test automation design for a Friends-page feature.