Functional and Non-Functional Testing Overview
There is no doubting the fact that both functional and non-functional testing are a part of complete quality assurance procedures. Consequently, it is crucial for digital organizations to comprehend the distinction between the two. Although both procedures are necessary for the application’s quality assurance process, they have different objectives.
By highlighting the instances where performance falls short of the anticipated outcomes, functional testing ensures that the app’s features comply with the requirements.
The non-functional aspects of an app, such as usability, performance, compliance, etc., are all verified during non-functional testing, which assists in identifying the larger quality issues.
Functional testing’s function
Functional testing verifies the underlying code snippets as well as compares the application’s functionality to the stated criteria or specifications.
Testing individual modules in isolation does not give a clearer picture than comparing the actual outputs to the planned outcomes. Errors typically appear in the interactions between modules.
Functional testing plays a crucial part in ensuring the application’s quality and functionality. Functional testing methods enable the quality assurance teams to confirm the software’s functionality in accordance with the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) and guarantee that the system operates in accordance with user requirements.
Functional testing ensures that the application is error-free and prepared for release. Functional testing focuses on producing a high-quality product and makes no assumptions about the system’s internal structure. Different functional testing techniques are used to examine the software’s usability characteristics, error situations, accessibility, and other key elements.
Non-functional testing’s function
Non-functional testing verifies the aspects of the software that might not be essential to functionality but are in charge of guaranteeing a positive user experience.
Something that fails a non-functional test may not always result in a problem that users would experience, but it may point to a larger systemic issue.
It is impossible to gauge an application’s capacity to manage heavy traffic, especially during times of peak demand, if non-functional testing is not conducted for the application. The program may become sluggish or possibly crash during times of high traffic, such as the holidays or other times of the year. In a different case, if the program is not examined for security flaws and vulnerabilities, it may be vulnerable to cyberattacks and potentially result in the exploitation of private client information. These kinds of incidents not only result in a poorly functioning application that consumers may uninstall, but they also damage the company’s brand.
It is clear that non-functional testing is just as important for a successful application as functional testing. Non-functional testing establishes reliability while ensuring the program runs without a hitch. It guarantees that the application can be relied upon even in the most trying circumstances because it has been tested to fulfill a wide range of business requirements. After doing non-functional testing, it is possible to be sure that the application will work with a variety of hardware and operating systems, guarantee a user-friendly and accessible user interface, meet performance and load requirements, and satisfy a wide range of other crucial business requirements.
Various Functional and Non-Functional Testing Methods
Typical functional test types include:
- A unit test is the initial stage of the software development lifecycle’s (SDLC) testing process. Software testers carry out this type of functional testing by writing and executing test scripts to make sure that the app’s smaller components function as intended.
- Unit testing and component testing are both types of functional testing. The crucial distinction is that during component testing, testers execute and test each application item separately, with or without isolation from other software pieces.
- Smoke testing is carried out following each build release. Smoke testing ensures that the build is stable for additional testing and that all parts of the test environment are functioning properly.
- Sanity testing: After smoke testing, testers conduct sanity testing to make sure the code modifications continue to function as intended.
- Testing for integration involves combining and validating the app’s individual components as a whole in order to find flaws and problems.
- Regression testing: This type of functional software testing makes sure that the application’s already existing features and functionalities are not being negatively impacted by code modifications.
- System testing: System testing is carried out following integration testing and is used to certify that the application is completely integrated.
- User acceptability testing (UAT) is the last stage of software testing, during which clients or end users act as test engineers to determine if the generated application satisfies the specifications or not. Prior to launching the application into production, UAT is a crucial type of functional testing.
Typical non-functional test types include
- Performance testing: This method checks that the app responds to requests in a timely manner and assesses the system’s overall performance.
- Load testing determines whether the system’s performance meets expectations in ideal and challenging circumstances. Load tests pinpoint the app’s maximum operational capacity and discover the root causes of performance bottlenecks that impede app performance.
- Stress testing: This procedure assesses how well a system performs when its resources are scarce. Low memory or low disk space on clients or servers exposes problems that cannot be identified under normal circumstances during stress testing.
- Security testing: Security testing makes sure there are no gaps that could result in a data leak or loss. Security testing is a crucial non-functional testing category that evaluates the app’s availability, integrity, authenticity, and authorization.
- Volume testing: Volume testing examines how an app behaves when processing a sizable amount of data and determines how well the app can manage big volumes of data.
- Usability testing: This type of non-functional testing assesses how user-friendly the system is. GUI testing guarantees that the output meets the predetermined objectives and is accurate, meaningful, and consistent.
- Testing for scalability measures an application’s capacity to scale its non-functional qualities as necessary. The load the app can handle, the number of transactions per second, the amount of data, and other factors could be included.
- User interface (UI) testing: UI testing assesses the GUI, makes sure it’s consistent, and makes it simple to utilize an application.
- Testing for compatibility: This non-functional procedure determines whether the program is compatible with other hardware and software in both the simplest and most complex settings.
- User manuals, setup instructions, readme files, release notes, etc. are all verified through documentation testing.
- Testing for failover: Testing for failover ensures the system is able to manage extra resources, like servers, in the event of a system failure.
- Audits are conducted as part of compliance testing to determine whether industry and governmental standards, such as GDPR, HIPAA, W3C, etc., are being followed.
Conclusion:
Functional and Non-Functional Testing – Overview” is an essential module within the Manual Testing Online Course, designed especially for beginners. In this segment, students delve into the foundational concepts of manual testing, focusing on two critical aspects: functional testing, which assesses the application’s features and capabilities, and non-functional testing, which evaluates performance, security, and usability. This course equips learners with the fundamental skills and knowledge necessary to rigorously test software applications manually. By understanding both manual and automation testing, students gain a comprehensive perspective on quality assurance, setting the stage for a successful career in software testing.