Functional and Non-functional Software Testing- All You Need to know

Software testing forms a key component of the software development life cycle. It helps keep a check on several parameters of the software. For example, software testing will ensure that your software or application platform doesn’t crash every other minute, accepts all valid inputs in the data from the user, provides the desirable experience along with taking care of the proper functioning of the UI/UX.

In other words, software testing forms the backbone of any application software. It helps businesses provide an unparalleled level of experience to the user, along with making sure that the experience stays unaltered. After all, imagine yourself in the scenario of the customer. How would you feel to open application software on your personal computer only to find that it crashes every 10 seconds? Doesn’t sound good! It and many more such issues are what software testers aim to resolve from the customer’s end. 

The goal of software testing is pretty straightforward- provide a robust software experience to the end-user by making sure that all the use cases are tested before the release. When use cases are already tested in different scenarios, testers are often able to find out faults if there are any in the software. As a result, there is a seamless transfer of experiences to the customer, keeping both the business as well as the customer happy towards the end of the day.

Different Kinds of Testing

But there’s more to testing that what meets the eye, while there are manual and automated forms of testing that people usually talk about, there are other subdivisions of testing that break down the complex process into small details. Every tested software is a collaborated effort of the manual and automated testing procedure. 

It is because even today with the advancement of technology, a lot of testing relies heavily on manual tasks rather than automated. One big example of this is the UI/UX testing, where the user’s experience to the front end is determined. Similarly, testing can be broadly classified into two categories known as functional and non-functional testing.

Especially with the software testing company growing at an unprecedented rate, there is a lot of scope for testers. While software testing heavily relies on agile methodologies such as DevOps that form the basis of testing for a majority of applications, other technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning also come into the picture. Having said this, developers are turning towards these technologies for both functional and non-functional testing procedures.

It is natural to wonder what these functional and non-functional testing procedures are and how do they create a difference in the world of software testing. To understand it in more details, let us take a deeper look at these-

Functional Testing

It is imperative to understand that when application software is designed, it has both functional and non-functional aspects to it. Functional aspects of the software would refer to aspects such as technical details, data manipulation, data processing, etc. 

In other words, it is carried out to ensure that every feature of the application works in perfect condition before it is delivered to the customer. Many people also refer to functional testing as a type of black-box testing whee each aspect of the functioning of the software is tested in detail by giving it a set of input.

Once the input values are given for different functions, their corresponding responses are monitored, and faults are identified. While functional testing doesn’t refer to one method or class of a module, it goes onto testing the entire slice of one particular function of the system. 

Functional testing mainly concentrates its efforts on the following factors such as error validation, major functionalities align with the basic usability of the application software. While software must be user-friendly and help the user navigate freely across different windows and screens it should also check whether suitable messages are displayed when an error occurs. For example, if the user enters their name in place of a phone number, the functionality must be able to show the error informing the user to enter the valid input details.

Based on the user requirement, functional testing can be further divided into factors such as unit testing, smoke testing, sanity testing, integration testing, regression testing, user acceptance testing among others. These help in testing the application software at different levels such as its smallest unit, its initial software build, stable software build among others.