A software product with poor usability, bad customer experience, and bugs can’t attain user interest or market share. Therefore, quality assurance services are not only an option but a necessity for product success – and that’s where functional testing can help.
Since the bar is continuously rising for user expectations, functional testing is one of the best ways to validate the system against its functional requirements. Functional testing aims to test product functions by verifying the output against the predefined functional requirements.
Functional testing involves black box testing and is not concerned with the application’s source code. It evaluates client/server communication, user interface, database, APIs, security, and other product functionalities. QA professionals can perform functional testing either manually or using automation.
Therefore, this article explains some of the common functional testing types that QA professionals employ to ensure high-quality products.
Types of Functional Testing
While the objective of functional testing sounds simple, the process involves many types, some of which might be preferred or prioritized over others based on the scope of the application and organization.
Unit Testing: Developers create test scripts to perform unit testing and evaluate individual units/components of the product against set requirements. Putting it simply, unit testing involves writing tests that call methods in each unit and validate them if they return the values that match desired requirements.
- In unit testing, code coverage is mandatory. QA services provider must ensure that test cases cover the following:
- code path coverage
- method coverage
- line coverage
Integration Testing: if a product needs numerous modules to function efficiently, the QA experts then perform integration testing to ensure that individual modules work optimally when operating in combination.
Smoke Testing: After every release, to ensure that software stability is intact and has no bugs, QA professionals perform smoke testing.
Sanity Testing: To ensure that every major functionality of the software product is working efficiently and in combination with other elements, testers perform sanity testing.
Beta/ Usability Testing: Customers test the product in a production environment. This stage is necessary to gauge how easy is it to navigate the user interface. Users’ feedback is considered for further improvements to the code.
Regression Testing: in this stage, testers make sure that changes to the codebase (debugging, new code, strategies, etc.) do not trigger some instability or disrupt the already existing functions.
Functional Testing & Its Process Workflow
Generally, functional testing in detail includes the following steps:
- Pinpoint which functionality of the product needs to undergo testing. The functionalities can vary from messages, main functions, error conditions, and product usability.
- Develop input data for functionalities that users need to test against specified requirements.
- Define acceptable output parameters in line with set requirements.
- Execute test cases.
- Compare the results from the test with the predefined output values. The difference in output demonstrates if the product is working as expected.
Since there are multiple test case scenarios for functional testing, the experts can test them through the different functional testing techniques:
System testing
Functional testing service providers employ system testing to test the software as a complete product. System testing is referred to as end-to-end testing, where QA experts can provide feedback on a product’s functionality and performance without prior knowledge of how it was programmed. This helps teams develop test cases that they can use moving forward.
Equivalence Tests
Test data is segregated into partitions called equivalence data cases. In this test, data in each partition must respond similarly. Consequently, you only need to test one condition across all partitions. If the condition does not work in one partition, it won’t work in the others.
Why Partner with Functional Testing Service Providers?
Most companies don’t have the time or money to invest in internal functional testing teams to test their software properly. This is where functional testing service providers can make a big difference. They can focus on the client’s needs and provide expert insights to help improve the products.
Conclusion
To summarize, functional testing provides an overview of a product’s functionalities. It ensures that each functionality should be tested separately to validate whether the product behaves as expected. Functional specifications are created during test planning and then executed accordingly.
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