Key Role of Functional Testing Services in Enabling Quality

The need to survive in a competitive market and become one of the blue-eyed products has forced business enterprises to majorly focus on quality assurance. This was not the case even a few years back, when quality assurance was considered a low-level R&D job and characterized by poor attitudes, lack of attention, and low budget. And QA testers or engineers were resented by developers for being pesky. However, with the Agile-DevOps methodology being adopted by enterprises, quality testing has become an integral part of the SDLC. Here, testers work in close coordination with developers in iterative sprints to test a newly written code and pass it to the next phase only when it meets all quality requirements.

The QA team, on its part, must know when to apply various types of testing to the software code, such as unit testing, system testing, and integration testing, among others. Importantly, it is not always possible to ensure 100% test coverage irrespective of the type of testing undertaken (manual or automated).

Why functional testing?

Functional testing is black-box testing that aims at validating the components or systems in a software product for various functional requirements and specifications. It ensures all functions of the application and user requirements meet the specifications as outlined by the client. This is achieved by providing specific inputs to the code and validating the outputs against any functional requirements. By applying a robust functional testing strategy, enterprises can ensure the software application performs as per the business objectives and user requirements. In a competitive environment, this can mean many things for business enterprises:

l Detecting and mitigating glitches early in the SDLC

l Isolating quality issues and working on them to minimize the time of resolution

l Checking whether new features, functionality, or enhancements do not cause any unintended consequences

l Minimizing rework, reducing the cost of testing, and improving the quality of software

Various types of functional testing services

Whether it is testing software applications for the web or mobile, there are various types of functional testing:

Unit testing: This happens to be the first phase of testing any software application. Here, testers check if individual components or parts of the software application work as per expectations or specifications. It validates the functioning of a software unit by checking whether inputs to the unit deliver a single desired output. It forms the foundation of complex software and is mostly achieved using functional test automation. Thus, if the individual components work as expected, the resulting integrated software will work perfectly. For example, In a unit testing exercise to check the functions of a calculator, testers can input two numbers and see if the output is the sum of the two numbers. Similarly, other unit tests can be conducted to check the functionality of the calculator in terms of multiplication, subtraction, and division.

Component testing: Similar to unit testing, component testing, aka module testing, validates the individual components or parts of a software application in isolation from the overall system. Unit testing is mainly conducted by developers in a white box format to validate the functioning of individual modules, while component testing is conducted by testers using a black box format to validate the functioning of individual modules. If the component under testing is needed by other components of the software, the testers may use a driver and stub to simulate interactions between them.

For example, if a banking application has the provision to schedule an appointment, the stub creates a simulated user profile while the driver offers a simulated schedule of appointment date and time. Here, the component under testing identifies the user’s location using GPS and shows the banking centers to choose from. Thus, with such automated functional testing of a component in isolation, the tester can validate the functioning of the GPS module.

Smoke testing: This type of functional testing checks whether the software application and its critical functionality are stable. So, if the build passes the smoke test, it is only then that it can be sent for further testing. Also known as build verification testing, it verifies if the critical functionality of the application meets its objectives. For example, in a software application for insurance, testers verify if a user is able to log in, browse to the specific page(s) and access the claim status without the application malfunctioning or crashing.

Sanity testing: It is a type of regression testing to validate any new functionality or bug fixes, and targets the software code that has been changed or added. For example, a particular page of a software application shows a 404 error when clicked. After fixing, the same is tested to verify if the navigation and basic functionality of the particular page are working as expected.

Regression testing: Whenever the software build undergoes any code change in terms of adding a new feature, regression testing, a type of functional automation testing, ensures the change has achieved the desired objective. In other words, the new feature runs as expected and delivers the required output without causing any unintended consequences.

Integration testing: In this type of testing, testers check if the individual units of code are able to work together as a group or module. In most modern software applications, self-contained modules handle a specific task, which, if not checked for their performance, can cause performance issues for the overall software application.

Conclusion

Functional testing for web applications or mobile apps is an integral part of the QA process where various functionalities of a software application are validated for expected outcomes. It is aimed at enhancing user experiences and meeting business objectives.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality