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hardAutomation Test Engineer interview question

Your regression suite has grown to 3 hours. How do you bring feedback time under 15 minutes?

What the interviewer wants to hear

  • Measure where time goes and find the slowest tests
  • Move checks down the pyramid and delete duplicates
  • Parallelise and shard across machines
  • Speed up setup with API login and data creation
  • Test impact analysis to run only affected tests on pull requests
  • Full suite runs nightly or before release

Model answer

I start by measuring: which tests are slowest, which spend most time in setup, and which overlap. Usually a few patterns dominate. UI login and data creation in every test, so I replace them with API setup and reused authenticated state. Business rules tested through the UI, so I move them to API or unit tests and keep one UI check. Duplicate tests covering the same path, which I remove. Then I parallelise: multiple workers per machine and sharding across, say, 10 CI machines, which only works once tests are independent. For pull requests, I add test impact analysis or tags so only tests related to the changed areas run, plus a fast smoke suite, while the full suite runs on merge or nightly. I also remove fixed sleeps and slow third-party calls with mocks. With these steps, getting from 3 hours to 10 or 15 minutes is realistic.

Can you answer it under time pressure?

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