10 technical questions to ask your clients while getting software test automation project

Question

I have a client who are planning to outsource software test automation works to my company. They are completely working on Microsoft technologies. Today I am going to meet them for the first time. Can you give me list of 10 basic technical questions you will ask if you were at my place to your client? These questions should help me understand their requirements with better clarity from the BA prospective. Also, I will be giving inputs to my tech lead based on the first meeting.

Answer 1

I do not have 10 questions, but I have specif set of questions I usually ask. These questions will help me determine time frame to complete the project, hiring strategy, framework design and tools and technologies to be used.

• Can you list technology stack you have used to develop your application? - This will help you to determine what automation tool to be use.
• What source code management system do you use? - This will help you design automation framework. Also it will help you determine what IDE and programming language to be used.
• What bug tracking tool do you use? - This will help you in designing the framework and also hire people with that specific experience.
• Do you have manual test cases ready? - We usually ask this because often times the client will not have manual test cases in place. They will have just product documentation or stories.
• What are environments do you have? Eg. dev,Test, Staging, Pre-production, production - This will again help you to decide what environment is more stable and where to execute your tests.
• Are we going to execute automation suite against Test environment? - For test automation, stability of an app is very important. This will help decide which environment is more stable.
• How often do you push build to Test? - This will help you understand application stability.
• What CI server do you use? - This will help you design framework. Your framework may very based on CI server you use.
• Do you follow agile? - This will help you determine what methodology they follow. So, you can hire people with that specific experience.

Above questions are really helpful. I will keep updating this as and when.