Explore By Scenario

The first human-powered vetting for real-world QA Engineers

Why automated vetting of QA doesn’t work

Quality Assurance is more than executing scripts. Great QAs think like users, isolate bugs, prevent flaky tests, and communicate clearly with product and engineering. Traditional code quizzes or multiple-choice tests miss the critical parts of QA work, like writing a crisp bug report from a messy support ticket, designing a manual test plan from ambiguous requirements, or knowing how to keep browser automation stable.

Woven’s experienced evaluators review every submission so you can see how candidates actually reason through real product issues. That’s how we reliably assess the end-to-end skills that matter for QA hiring not just whether someone can check a box. (Typical customers save ~10.5 engineering hours per hire and retain 96% of new hires.)

Below you’ll get a sneak peak at the newest scenarios Woven customers are using to assess QA Engineer candidates.

Explore QA Scenarios

🕙 Time Limit: 30 min

File a Bug Report From a Support Ticket

Scenario: A teammate shares details about a user’s login problem. The candidate tests the working app, gathers evidence, confirms whether they can reproduce the issue, and then writes two clear updates: one for an engineering teammate and one for a non-technical stakeholder. This scenario emphasizes problem-solving, collaboration, and crisp communication, not just test execution.

What you’ll learn about the candidate

  • Information gathering: How they collect logs, steps to reproduce, environment details, and impact.
  • Issue research: How they form hypotheses, isolate variables, and validate potential root causes.
  • Knowledge sharing: How they document findings so others can act (and reuse) efficiently.
  • Engineer-to-engineer clarity: How precisely they communicate technical concepts and next steps to developers.
  • Plain-language communication: How well they translate the issue and path forward for non-engineers.

 

Why it matters for QA hiring: Real-world QA isn’t just finding bugs, it’s turning fuzzy reports into reproducible issues, prioritizing impact, and aligning next steps across technical and non-technical teammates. This scenario reveals the signal you miss in code quizzes: how candidates investigate, document, and communicate. Strong performance here predicts faster MTTR, less ticket ping-pong, clearer “definition of done,” and higher trust with engineering, support, and product.

🕙 Time Limit: 45 min

Write a Manual QA Test Plan (New Scenario)

Scenario: You’re designing a new feature and want to ensure it launches with high quality. The candidate is given a brief spec/mockups and asked to design a concise manual QA test plan that prioritizes risk, maps critical paths and edge cases, and calls out assumptions or open questions. The goal is to see how they think before anyone writes a line of test automation.

What you’ll learn about the candidate

  • Corner-case thinking: How well they anticipate edge cases and negative paths.
  • Precision in communication: How clearly and concretely they describe test steps, data, and expected results.
  • Non-functional awareness: Whether they consider performance, reliability, accessibility, and other non-functional requirements.
  • Productive inquiry: The quality of their clarification questions and stated assumptions to de-risk ambiguity.

 

Why it matters for QA hiring: Strong manual planning is the backbone of a high-signal QA assessment—it reveals product thinking, risk prioritization, and communication skills that automation alone can’t surface.

🕙 Time Limit: 20 min

Playwright Fundamentals & Best Practices

Scenario: Candidates complete a focused Playwright (Node.js) knowledge check that covers the concepts and patterns QA engineers rely on to build stable, maintainable browser tests. Questions emphasize real-world quality practices, selectors, waiting/retries, fixtures, isolation, and CI usage, grounded in Playwright’s official capabilities and docs. (Assign either this or the Puppeteer quiz, not both.)

What you’ll learn about the candidate:

  • Selector strategy & stability: Choosing resilient locators and avoiding brittle anti-patterns.
  • Flakiness prevention: Correct use of auto-waiting, timeouts, retries, and deterministic test setup/teardown.
  • Test structure & maintainability: Projects, fixtures, Page Object patterns, parameterized tests, and readability.
  • Network & data control: Stubbing, intercepting, seeding data, and handling auth/session state safely.
  • Parallelism & CI readiness: Sharding, workers, artifacts (screenshots, videos, traces), and performance trade-offs.
  • Debugging & observability: Using trace viewer, console logs, and diagnostics to speed root-cause analysis.
  • Web-scraping & advanced workflows: Handling navigation, file uploads/downloads, and headless vs. headed runs.

 

Why it matters for QA hiring: Strong Playwright fundamentals translate directly into faster, more reliable pipelines and fewer flaky tests. This knowledge check surfaces practical judgment, how candidates design selectors, control state, and debug—so you can trust the automation they ship and keep your CI green.

Where Woven fits in your process

Use Woven where you’d normally place a take-home or a live screen. You’ll evaluate real-world QA behaviors such as communication, product thinking, and test quality, without burning your team on ad-hoc exercises. Many teams report major interview loop reductions and faster time-to-offer.

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