How to Achieve Quick Software Delivery and End User Approval with Functional Test Automation

The pressure to remain competitive often forces the hands of business enterprises to deliver software applications at a faster pace. This can often mean quality assurance is given a pass or just used as an also-ran activity. Experience has shown that such an approach can be disastrous for enterprises, both in the short and long term. Since no customer would countenance a buggy application, compromising the quality of an application can mean committing a harakiri. It is not without reason that Agile and DevOps have come to define methodologies where quality lies at the core of the development process. This is unlike the also-ran activity taking place in a traditional software development environment.

Today, organizations invest a lot of money, time, and effort in performing functional tests, thereby ensuring the quality, reliability, and performance of the software application. As mentioned earlier, with the adoption of Agile and DevOps environments by enterprises where continuous integration/delivery is the primary objective, functional test automation has become critical. So, how does one go about planning a functional testing strategy and deciding on the tests to be automated?

Why should one automate functional testing?

It is a foregone conclusion that rigorous functional testing is critical to developing a successful software application. The challenge, however, is in speeding up the testing process without compromising on quality, coverage, and budgetary constraints. While manual testing can be utilized for functional testing as a service in certain test cases, it can work against enterprises’ need to achieve shorter development cycles. Besides being time-consuming and tedious, manual testing can be prone to error.

Automated functional testing can help execute test cases for a pre-determined range of parameters. For instance, if the software application contains a registration form with a multiple-choice question, the automated test script can populate the answer field with each of the answers. In addition, any answer or outcome that does not match the script will be flagged for review, saving time and money.

What tests should be automated?

The functional testing services should know the specific tests to be set up for automation since choosing the wrong ones can prove to be an effort in futility. The specific tests to be automated and set up for shift-left testing are:

Smoke testing: This type of testing is performed to check whether the basic functionality of the software application is working. It covers the most crucial functionality and components of the application to ensure the smooth functioning of the most critical features of the application. The software application would be considered reliable and stable once it passes the smoke test. It is only after ascertaining the stability of the application that the functional testing of any newly added features is performed. However, in the event of the failure of the smoke test, the application would be considered unstable and sent for fixing.

Regression testing: This type of functional automation testing ensures the functionality of the software application is not impacted after the addition of a new feature, code, or upgrade. Its primary purpose is to detect any bugs or errors that might have gotten into the existing build post-addition of new features. Since regression testing is repetitive, automating this functional testing as a service can help testers increase the scale and test coverage.

Sanity testing: As a subset of regression testing, sanity testing ensures the code changes made to the application are working fine. It works as a checkpoint to decide whether testing for the build can continue.

Integration testing: This type of testing checks whether the individual modules of the application are working as expected, especially when they are integrated with the main build. Here, data and operational commands are treated as a whole system instead of individual components. It is performed to identify issues or bugs with API calls, database access, UI operations, data formats, and operating timing.

System testing: It checks whether the overall software application performs according to the given requirements. System testing is an important part of functional testing and verifies if the application meets the business, practical, and operational requirements.

How to conduct automated functional testing

The series of steps to execute functional test automation are:

l Identifying the functional components or modules of the application for testing. These may include accessibility, usability, error conditions, and the principal functions of the application.

l Creating the data to be entered as input for functional testing.

l Finalizing the expected input-based outcome for the functionality.

l Running the automated test scripts to execute test cases for functional testing.

l Comparing the output with the expected results to determine whether the functional testing was successful.

Conclusion

Functional testing is a critical requirement to declare any software application fit before its release. And automating various aspects of functional testing helps testers execute repeatable tests quickly, accurately, and holistically.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.