For any team looking to improve their functional testing process, it’s important to start with a clear answer to the question: what is functional testing?
What is functional testing? What are the types of functional testing?
So, what is functional testing? Functional testing is the QA process used to determine if software is behaving per the established requirements for it.
Functional testing typically should use a black-box testing approach, where the tester knows nothing about the internal system logic.
Creating a functional test typically involves creating input values, executing test cases, and comparing the actual result with the expected result. Ideally, the actual result should match the expected result, otherwise the test has usually uncovered an expected problem in the software if the actual result doesn’t match the expected result.
Types of functional testing
Within the broader concept of functional testing, there are several types of functional testing. These include:
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Unit testing
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Smoke testing
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Sanity testing
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Regression testing
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Integration testing
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Usability testing (which can include beta testing)
Unit testing refers to tests that cover individual components or units of an overall software product or system. Code coverage is crucial to effective unit testing. Test cases should exist to provide line coverage, code path coverage, and method coverage.
Smoke testing occurs after each build is released, to ensure the software is generally stable and not experiencing major instabilities.
Sanity testing usually occurs after smoke testing, with the aim of verifying that major areas of functionality within the software are working in isolation and in relation to other areas of the software.
Regression testing is performed to determine whether or not changes to the project code result in some new instability or disruption of existing features.
Integration testing is performed to ensure different parts or modules within a software system work as expected when operating together as a combined system.
Usability testing involves letting actual users test the product in a production environment. With beta testing, this often means including actual customers in the usability testing process to collect feedback.
Functional testing techniques
There are also several techniques that can be used to perform functional testing. These include:
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End-user and system tests
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Equivalence tests
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Boundary value tests
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Decision-based tests
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Ad-hoc tests
Functional testing best practices: Automation and more
When it comes to actually designing and implementing the right functional testing process, there are a few key areas where you can implement best practices to achieve success.
First, it’s important to set up a dedicated testing automation team. It’s important that whoever is in charge of testing automation has an expert level of understanding related to software testing automation. It’s even better to partner with a team like ours at testRigor to bring industry best practices to your team with the latest cutting-edge software testing automation technology. Not having the right level of expertise involved from the start can result in a huge amount of wasted effort if your automated tests don’t effectively cover your software and improve the quality of your software product.
Another best practice is to start with automating the tests that require the least amount of setup or configuration to execute, or where there is significant value to introducing automation. For example, tests that can be run repeatedly with no changes each time, similar tests with different data, tests that are prone to human error, tests that should be run across different browsers, devices, and operating systems, and P1 and P2 test cases which can require a lot of time and effort.
Other best practices include testing frequently, using data-driven tests, writing tests to maximize reusability, and keeping a close eye on changes that can break tests like UI changes.
Why automate functional testing?
There are many advantages to automating functional testing as much as possible. Some reasons include:
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Reduce effort and costs related to manual testing
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Reduce overall time required and rounds of communication
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Reduce human error due to overlooking problems in testing results
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Reduce human error due to misunderstanding requirements
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Reduce human error due to improperly performed tests
In the past, automating functional testing typically meant team members would need to spend more time on developing test cases for each test, but now teams like testRigor are automating the test case creation process even further to realize additional gains in quality and efficiency.
How to choose the right functional testing automation tool or solution
Traditionally, software teams have used a range of tools to help them with setting up and maintaining automation of functional testing.
These tools have included software tools like Selenium, Katalon Studio, QTP, JUnit, and more. Some are specialized for specific types of languages or projects.
However, the software industry is entering a new era of functional testing automation. More and more software companies are now turning to teams like testRigor to help maximize functional testing automation through advanced artificial intelligence-powered software testing which learns from actual user behavior and makes test writing as simple as plain English. If you want to ensure your team maximizes the efficiency gains that come with functional testing automation, we highly recommend getting in touch with the friendly experts at testRigor to start putting AI-driven software testing automation to work for your team.