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Answer card
Senior SDET decision card
A scenario card for answering senior SDET questions through risk, evidence, investigation cost and operational ownership.
Go to the answer cardFree, on this page, no email.
Use this in practice
Use one card per scenario. The tool comes after you have defined the cost of failure and the evidence the release must trust.
Fill the card
- Failure: name the product behaviour and the cost of being wrong.
- Evidence: define what must be observed to trust the behaviour.
- Layer: choose the cheapest test layer that can produce that evidence.
- Operations: name data, environment, runtime and maintenance cost.
- Owner: define who investigates and how quickly.
- Change condition: state what would move the test to another layer.
Worked prompt
- A payment confirmation test fails twice a week. Decide whether it may block release.
- Separate product failure from environment, timing and shared-data failure.
- Preserve the failure artefacts before adding a retry.
- Give the check back its blocking right only when the signal is trusted and ownership is explicit.
Go deeper
This resource covers one decision. The books below go further on the same subject, written from the hiring side from 500+ technical interviews. Each book page shows what is inside, who it is for, and a free sample where there is one.
