1.14Question 4

Prompt: You have a QA team of 5 and they are all automation engineers. What is the problem and how do you fix it? What a strong answer should cover:

• Identifying the skills diversity gap
• Explaining why homogeneous teams miss entire categories of defects
• Proposing a rebalancing strategy
• Considering both hiring and development approaches Example answer:
• "The problem is a skills monoculture. Five automation engineers will build excellent automated tests, but they will likely underinvest in exploratory testing, performance testing, security testing, and usability concerns. They will automate the happy paths and miss the edge cases that require human judgment and domain expertise."
• "The fix depends on budget. If I can hire, my next hire is a strong manual/exploratory tester with deep product curiosity -- someone who finds the bugs automation never will."
• "If I cannot hire, I develop from within: assign one engineer to spend 20% of their time on exploratory testing and another on performance testing basics. Create a rotation where each engineer spends one sprint per quarter focused on a different testing discipline."
• "Long-term, my target composition for a 5-person team would be: 2 automation engineers, 1 exploratory/manual tester, 1 SDET focused on testability and tooling, and 1 specialist (performance or security, depending on the product's risk profile)."