Standardize Testing for Checkout Team | Dataford Interview Questions

Project Background

ShopFlow, a mid-market e-commerce platform, is preparing a major checkout rewrite to support subscriptions, promo bundles, and regional tax logic before the holiday season. The engineering team has delivered features quickly, but recent incidents showed inconsistent unit and integration testing practices across services. You are the program manager asked to drive a testing enablement project so developers have clear guidance, tooling, and release expectations within 8 weeks.

Key Stakeholders

The Engineering Director wants better release quality without slowing delivery. The QA Manager wants stronger integration coverage and fewer late-cycle defects. The Checkout Product Manager is pushing to keep the feature roadmap on schedule for a committed October merchant launch. Senior developers want flexibility and minimal process overhead, while junior developers are asking for concrete examples, templates, and review standards.

Constraints

Team: 10 engineers, 1 QA lead, 1 DevEx engineer, 1 PM
Timeline: 8 weeks before code freeze
Budget: $45,000 for tooling, training, and contractor support
Current baseline: unit test coverage is 41%, integration coverage exists for only 3 of 11 critical checkout flows
Dependency: DevEx engineer is available only 50% of time; 2 senior engineers are also supporting production incidents

Complications

A Sev-2 checkout bug last month reduced confidence in automated tests and increased executive scrutiny.
Two senior engineers disagree on whether integration tests should run on every pull request or only nightly because of CI cost and build time.
The Product Manager will resist any plan that delays the subscription launch.

Your Task

Create an 8-week execution plan to define and roll out unit and integration testing guidance.
Propose how you would align stakeholders on testing standards, ownership, and trade-offs.
Define measurable success criteria for adoption and quality improvement before launch.
Identify the top risks to delivery and how you would mitigate them.
Recommend how to phase the rollout if full implementation cannot be completed before code freeze.

Problem

Project Background

Key Stakeholders

Constraints

Team: 10 engineers, 1 QA lead, 1 DevEx engineer, 1 PM
Timeline: 8 weeks before code freeze
Budget: $45,000 for tooling, training, and contractor support
Current baseline: unit test coverage is 41%, integration coverage exists for only 3 of 11 critical checkout flows
Dependency: DevEx engineer is available only 50% of time; 2 senior engineers are also supporting production incidents

Complications

A Sev-2 checkout bug last month reduced confidence in automated tests and increased executive scrutiny.
Two senior engineers disagree on whether integration tests should run on every pull request or only nightly because of CI cost and build time.
The Product Manager will resist any plan that delays the subscription launch.

Your Task

Create an 8-week execution plan to define and roll out unit and integration testing guidance.
Propose how you would align stakeholders on testing standards, ownership, and trade-offs.
Define measurable success criteria for adoption and quality improvement before launch.
Identify the top risks to delivery and how you would mitigate them.
Recommend how to phase the rollout if full implementation cannot be completed before code freeze.

Problem

Project Background

Key Stakeholders

Constraints

Team: 10 engineers, 1 QA lead, 1 DevEx engineer, 1 PM
Timeline: 8 weeks before code freeze
Budget: $45,000 for tooling, training, and contractor support
Current baseline: unit test coverage is 41%, integration coverage exists for only 3 of 11 critical checkout flows
Dependency: DevEx engineer is available only 50% of time; 2 senior engineers are also supporting production incidents

Complications

A Sev-2 checkout bug last month reduced confidence in automated tests and increased executive scrutiny.
Two senior engineers disagree on whether integration tests should run on every pull request or only nightly because of CI cost and build time.
The Product Manager will resist any plan that delays the subscription launch.

Your Task

Create an 8-week execution plan to define and roll out unit and integration testing guidance.
Propose how you would align stakeholders on testing standards, ownership, and trade-offs.
Define measurable success criteria for adoption and quality improvement before launch.
Identify the top risks to delivery and how you would mitigate them.
Recommend how to phase the rollout if full implementation cannot be completed before code freeze.

Problem

Project Background

Key Stakeholders

Constraints

Team: 10 engineers, 1 QA lead, 1 DevEx engineer, 1 PM
Timeline: 8 weeks before code freeze
Budget: $45,000 for tooling, training, and contractor support
Current baseline: unit test coverage is 41%, integration coverage exists for only 3 of 11 critical checkout flows
Dependency: DevEx engineer is available only 50% of time; 2 senior engineers are also supporting production incidents

Complications

A Sev-2 checkout bug last month reduced confidence in automated tests and increased executive scrutiny.
Two senior engineers disagree on whether integration tests should run on every pull request or only nightly because of CI cost and build time.
The Product Manager will resist any plan that delays the subscription launch.

Your Task

Create an 8-week execution plan to define and roll out unit and integration testing guidance.
Propose how you would align stakeholders on testing standards, ownership, and trade-offs.
Define measurable success criteria for adoption and quality improvement before launch.
Identify the top risks to delivery and how you would mitigate them.
Recommend how to phase the rollout if full implementation cannot be completed before code freeze.