A financial services company is adopting an Agile development model. The Test Automation Engineer (TAE) is tasked with selecting a suitable automation tool for a new trading application. The development team has strong Java skills, while the manual QA team has deep domain knowledge but limited programming experience. The SUT is a complex web application with a REST API backend. Which factor is MOST critical when selecting a test automation tool for this context?
A project following a strict Waterfall model is in the verification phase. The test automation suite, which was developed during the implementation phase, is now being executed. A significant number of tests are failing due to mismatches in UI element locators. What is a primary disadvantage of test automation highlighted by this scenario?
A development team is building a microservices-based e-commerce platform. The Order service consumes APIs from the Inventory service. To ensure stability and independent deployment, the teams have decided to implement contract testing. The Order service team (the consumer) defines the exact request/response structure they expect from the Inventory service. Which of the following statements accurately describes this implementation?
A Test Automation Engineer (TAE) is setting up a new CI/CD pipeline for a mobile application. The goal is to get rapid feedback. The pipeline includes stages for building, running unit tests, and deploying to a test environment. The TAE needs to integrate system-level UI tests. Which approach should be applied to integrate these tests effectively without slowing down the primary build and deployment feedback loop? (Select TWO).
A team manages testware for multiple SUTs that share a common set of features but also have unique functionalities. To support different release cycles and feature sets, the TAE needs to manage the test cases and test environment configurations effectively. The SUT releases use feature toggles to enable or disable functionality. How should the TAE manage the testware to align with this release strategy?
During a pilot project for a new Test Automation Solution (TAS), a TAE observes that the automated tests running on shared test devices (e.g., mobile phones) are intermittently failing. Investigation reveals that the failures correlate with high CPU and memory usage on the devices, often caused by other processes. This was not a problem during manual testing. Which deployment risk does this scenario highlight?
A test automation framework has a set of test scripts where database connection strings, API endpoints, and user credentials are hardcoded directly within each script. This has led to significant maintenance overhead whenever the test environment changes. To improve maintainability, the TAE decides to refactor the code. Which clean code principle is MOST directly addressed by this refactoring effort?
True or False: When verifying a new Test Automation Solution (TAS), the process should focus solely on the functional correctness of the test scripts themselves.
An automated regression suite contains a test case that fails intermittently, approximately 20% of the time. Root cause analysis is difficult. The test verifies a critical payment processing workflow. What is the most appropriate immediate action for the TAE to take regarding this test case?
A TAE is analyzing the test results of a web application and notices that many test failures are due to changes in the CSS selectors used for UI elements. This requires significant manual effort to update the test scripts after each front-end release. Which continuous improvement opportunity would provide the MOST effective solution to this problem?