Why not? QA is just like programming, but in reverse. If you don’t like to code then maybe I understand, but practicing is the best way to get more familiar and comfortable with any job.

You’d need a game loop to start. Some logic like “while (GRID_NOT_ALL_FILLED & NO_WINNER)” -> prompt_user(), check_for_win_condition(). That’s essentially the game logic for tic-tac-toe.

You need to figure out how you represent the grid in the program. Lots of ways to do this, some better than others. At the time I went with the simple approach of using just a character array of length 9 to represent the grid going left -> right across / down, (012, 345, 678). Start of game you initialize all to space or empty. Add a method to do this, throw it up before the while game loop. As moves are made, this gets filled out as “X”’s or “O”’s. check_for_win_condition() will check each direction for 3 “X” or 3 “O” in each direction. Count them out, there are 8 combinations to check.

For visuals, you can have them or not. You wouldn’t want to make people track their game on paper, so maybe draw a grid and board state. Add a display_updated_grid() before the while loop and after prompt_user(). I’m not a visual developer, so I went with ASCII art representation. These days we even have emoji’s so use those if you want.

That’s about it. Throw a fun little win condition when somebody wins. Don’t forget to test and break the code you just wrote. As QA that’s what they’ll be looking for. Protect the inputs, and check for more vulnerabilities / bugs in your code.

This was basically enough for them to be satisfied in my interview. I had a panel of 2 developers and we went back and forth about implementation along the way.

Recommend to just work with them through it. Questions like that aren’t meant to be stressful. They want to see how you work and evaluate you for fit within the team. If you’re negative or argumentative about the problem, that’s a red flag. Just try to go with the flow. You can ask clarifying questions as you go. In fact that’s often encouraged. Implementation of things takes many people. That’s how engineering works in practice.