The functional or requirement specifications help define what QA engineers consider acceptable while running functional tests. These specifications are a document that tells the QA engineers what actions they must take to determine the conformance of the software system. This document can also ask them to run tests on specific business side scenarios for an overall system picture.
Hence, we understand that QA engineers can carry out functional testing in two ways:
- Requirements-based functional testing: This method contains instructions on validating the software system's functional aspects.
- Business scenarios-based functional testing: This method contains instructions on validating the software system based on business scenarios.
Functional testing is software testing that ensures a software system works according to its given specifications. This test's primary goal is to test the functional aspects of the application's software by providing the input and verifying the output based on requirements.
This test does not concern itself with the application's source code and mainly involves black box testing. It checks the APIs, security, client/server communication, database, UI, and other application functionalities. Testers can run functional tests either by using automation or manually.
What do you test in Functional Testing?
Testers primarily run functional testing to check the software system's functionalities. The areas this testing concentrates on are:
- Accessibility: Runs accessibility checks on the system to see if it meets accessibility requirements.
- Error Conditions: Whenever there is an error, the system usually provides a valuable error message. This test validates that your system works well and provides the appropriate error messages to debug.
- Mainline functions: The system has no value if its main functions do not work well. This testing runs to ensure this does not happen.
- Basic Usability: The test runs a usability test to ensure that users navigating your system can do so seamlessly.
The Different Functional Testing Types
- Unit Testing
- Smoke Tests
- Sanity Tests
- Regression Tests
- Integration Tests
- Usability Testing
Functional testing generally follows the steps mentioned below:
- Determine which aspect of the software system the testers need to test. These aspects or functionalities can vary from error conditions, product usability, messages, or central functions.
- Create input data according to specific requirements for the functionalities that need testing.
- Based on the outlined requirements, determine which output parameters are acceptable and which ones are not.
- Execute test cases.
- Finally, compare the expected output with the actual result you receive from the test. Tracking this will reveal if your software system works well.