6.3Questions to Ask in Your First Week

These are organized by audience. You do not need to ask all of them -- choose the ones most relevant to your role and level.

Questions for Your QA Manager

1. "What does success look like for me in 30, 60, and 90 days?"
2. "What is the biggest quality challenge the team is facing right now?"
3. "How is QA performance measured here?"
4. "What QA initiatives are currently in progress or planned?"
5. "What has the team tried before that did not work?"
6. "How is the QA team structured relative to the development teams?"
7. "What is the budget situation for tools, training, and conferences?"
8. "Who are the key stakeholders I should build relationships with?"

Questions for QA Team Members

9. "What is the most painful part of your daily work?"
10. "Which areas of the product are the scariest to test? Why?"
11. "What do you wish was automated but is not?"
12. "Where do flaky tests come from, and how are they handled?"
13. "What is the test data situation -- easy or painful?"
14. "How do you handle testing when requirements are unclear?"
15. "What is the onboarding experience like -- what do you wish someone had told you on day 1?"

Questions for Developers

16. "How do you prefer to receive bug reports?"
17. "At what point in your development process would QA involvement be most helpful?"
18. "What is your experience with the test suite -- do you trust it? Do you run it?"
19. "Are there areas of the code that you consider fragile or risky?"
20. "How do you handle test failures in CI -- do you fix them immediately or skip?"
21. "What would make your life easier from a QA perspective?"

Questions for Product Owners

22. "What upcoming features have the highest quality risk?"
23. "How are acceptance criteria typically defined? Is QA involved?"
24. "What was the last production incident that affected customers, and how was it handled?"
25. "Which areas of the product get the most customer complaints?"
26. "How do you prioritize bug fixes versus new features?"

Questions for DevOps/SRE

27. "What is the deployment pipeline, and where do tests fit in?"
28. "How are test environments managed? Who can spin up a new one?"
29. "What monitoring and alerting exists for production quality?"
30. "What is the incident response process, and is QA involved?"
31. "What are the biggest infrastructure bottlenecks affecting test execution?"

Questions to Ask Yourself

32. "What is the gap between how testing is done here and how I think it should be done?"
33. "What are 3 quick wins I could deliver in the next 30 days?"
34. "What is the biggest risk to product quality that no one is talking about?"
35. "Where can I add the most value given my specific skills and experience?"