Testing plays a vital role in any software or application development.
Functional testing is done to test features or functionality of an application or software. All the possibilities, including failure and boundary conditions are considered in functional testing.
Any functionality is tested by providing inputs, observing its output and comparing the actual results with the expected ones. Here are some effective procedures or best practices that may come handy while you perform functional testing:
1. Collect information required to perform testing
It is important to know what is to be tested and what the plan or procedure is, for testing. The development team has information about critical user commands and processes. Collect the information and test the critical things first.
It is important to be aware of market demands for product development. Document or matrix should be prepared to link the product to the requirement and to the test cases. Matrices should be modified as per the changes in requirement.
2. Make Test plan and test cases
Planning for what should be done to perform the testing, includes goals and scope of testing, number of people, hardware and software tools to be involved in the testing and schedule of testing, and number of test cases that should be written to perform testing. Test cases are nothing but input data based on the functionality’s specification. These test cases should be arranged and ranked as per priority to reduce delay and risk. The development team should review these test plans.
3. Execute the test
Test plans and actual functionality should match to execute the test correctly. Test cases should be written in such a way that it canbe modified if necessary with the changing needs of the product. For further analysis, problems faced and its solutions can be documented.
4. Consider the automated testing
Automated testing is done to improve quality of the product or software and also to save time. The tester has to decide about what should be automated.
Automated testing is slightly costlier in short span; but, in the long run it is more beneficial for the product. Avoid performing automation on things that can be cheaply and effectively done by manual testing.
5. Manage defects with data storage system
Many people working on same functionality may result in repetition of defect reports, incorrect order of issue solving, consideration of wrong defects and much more. To avoid this, acentralized data storage system should be managed which can be referred by everyone.
The system includes standard templates for defect reporting and verifying, ranking of defects as per priority and information about the assignment of tasks. This helps in solving problemsone by one.
6. Reporting of test results
A test result report is presented in a specific format which includes summary of all test cases executed and the time taken at each stage for each feature with its status and progress. It also provides details of any new defect found during testing.
Overall, test result report should be presented in a clear and simple way for understanding of the development team.
7. Analysis
Problems and options in both testing and development can be detected during analysis. It helps in improving procedures followed in product development. Analysis is helpful to make product success.