Functional Testing

As the name suggests, the functional Testing is for ensuring that the system requirements and/or specifications have been implemented in the application.

Functional testing uses the following techniques:

1. Requirements Based Testing
2. Regression Testing
3. Error – Handling Testing
4. Manual – support Testing
5. Intersystem Testing
6. Control Testing
7. Parallel Testing

Requirements Based Testing:

This technique is to ensure that the requirements have been properly incorporated in the application. Here the base is the Functional Specification Document or the Software Requirement Specification or the User Requirement Specification or simply the Use Case document(Different in different Organization). The testing involves validating the application's behaviour against the doument.

Regression Testing:

Software applications are subjected to change. There are many examples where new change in the system have introduced several defects and/or affected the old functionality. So the dependent functionality(s) should be tested whenever a change is introduced in the system. The regression test(s) should be automated to reduce time in testing the same scenarios multiple times.

Error-handling Testing:

This testing is to test the ability of the application to recognize the error conditions and to respond them correctly. Testers should identify sufficent number of negative scenarios to cover up all possible error conditions.

Manual – support Testing:

The functions performed by people while preparing the test data which would be used in the automated system is equally imporant as the testing of the actual application. Because if the functions performed are incoorect, then obviously the testing would be improper.

So this testing concentrates on testing the functions performed by people.

Intersystem Testing:

This testing concetrates on the integration aspect. The interconnection would be in terms of data coming from another system or data leaving this system to go into another system. This testing ensures that all these data and parameter movements are proper.

Control Testing:

This testing attributes to testing of integrity aspects of the system. For example, testing data validation is equally important as testing an application with respect to the requirement document. Similarly, testing Back up/Recovery, Audit trail and Documentation etc is equally important.


Parallel Testing:

In software industry versioning of the application is a very common phenomenon. Testing the consistency of the processing of the new application with respect to the previous version becomes important. This is what is done in this testing.