Functional testing is a process of testing software to ensure that it is working as expected by the users and stakeholders. To conduct functional testing, it is important for the tester to understand when to go with functional testing and proven industry practices in conducting testing processes. Here, we discuss the process, types, significance, and best industry practices for conducting different types of functional testing.
Importance of Functional Testing in Software Development
In the software testing process, testers check if all requirements listed in the software requirement specification (SRS) and business requirement specification (BRS) are achieved. Especially, the functional testing mainly pivoted at customer requirements is tested to see if the methodology checks that the application reflects the experience of the users and stakeholders.
The tester focuses more on the functional goals and program specifications of the software rather than the code. The functional testing process is also called black box testing. Black box testing examines an application's performance, security, functionality, and all other features. It is done to ensure that products are ready to be released and tell us the status of products in real time. Significantly, black box testing helps testers to uncover termination errors.
Significant Types of Functional Testing
The QA team performs different types of functional testing during the entire software testing life cycle. Here are the functional testing types that the Quality Assurance team performs:
- Unit Testing: In unit testing, mobile app developers or web developers primarily focus on testing the internal logic of the code to test the behavior of a function or class.
- Component Testing: Component testing is performed once the unit testing is done. Testing of individual modules/components without integrating all components to verify it results in the expected outcome or not.
- Regression Testing: Regression testing is a type of software testing process that confirms code changes have not affected the existing features. While performing regression testing, the tester will execute both passed and failed test cases.
- Smoke Testing: Whenever the build is received for QA testing,, the first thing is to do a smoke test on the build. Here, QA verifies whether the major functionalities of the application are working or not.
- Integration Testing: It is one of the key functional testing types where all the individual modules or components are integrated. The reason for this level of testing is to find faults hindering the interaction or flow between all the integrated units or modules.
- Sanity Testing: Sanity testing is also called surface-level testing. The tester verifies that all menus, commands, and functions available in the project are working fine. The main objective of this testing is to verify the rationality of the system to proceed with more rigorous testing.
- System Testing: System testing will be performed once the integration testing is done. In this type, testing of a complete and fully integrated software product is done. Here the tester tests from an end-to-end perspective.
- UAT Testing: User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is performed by the clients and end users. This testing happens prior to moving into the production environment. Here the goal of UAT is to check the end-to-end business flow.
These functional testing types play a prominent role in ensuring quality, performance, and user engagement (post-launch). Let’s look at the step-by-step process for a successful software testing process.
Steps To follow in Functional Testing/Software Testing Process
- Identify the features that the software is expected to perform.
- Create input data based on the specified functionalities.
- Determine the outcome based on the software features and functionalities.
- Execute the test case for each module.
- Compare the actual and expected outputs.
- Optimize the code to achieve desired results
- Monitor the functionalities and repeat the black box testing for code accuracy.
Functional Testing Process
- Understand functional specifications
- Define enter and exit criteria
- Test case designing
- Create input data and define expected output
- Execute test cases
- While executing test cases, compare actual vs. expected output.
- If an actual result doesn’t match with the expected result, create a defect and send the report to the developer
- Perform regression testing
- Test sign-off
Benefits of Functional Testing or Software Testing Process
Functional testing plays an important role in evaluating the performance of a software application before it’s delivered to stakeholders.
- Scales up the quality of the product
- Make sure that all the customer requirements are met.
- Produces a defect-free application
- Reduces risks associated with this project
- Proves that the system is working fine
When Not to Use Functional Testing Types
Every coin has two sides, and so does functional testing. The application of functional testing has some boundaries, so the tester should be aware of when not to implement functional testing types. Here are those:
- Various logical mistakes in the software are not identified in the testing process.
- Focus is more on the results of the source code and not on how the developer implements the actual source code.
In functional testing, the tester should not only concentrate on the functionality of the module but should rather focus on structure too without ignoring functionality. This should profoundly be based on the user’s perspective.
About Author
Chandana works as a Software Test Engineer at V-Soft consulting. Her Software Testing career spans for more than 3 years. As a test engineer she gained sound testing knowledge in testing Web & Mobile Apps (Android & iOS) , GUI, Functional, Integration, System, Ad-hoc, Usability, Database, Smoke Regression and Retesting. Also, she is very proficient knowledge in Agile methodology and AI domains.
