Today’s businesses are implementing Agile and DevOps to achieve faster and quality releases. The DevOps method embedded fast output achieved with continuous integration with continuous software delivery and continuous testing. Many software testing methods like functional, retrieval, performance, security testing, etc., are used to ensure high-quality products. From these methods, the function testing method plays a vital role in software extraction in agile processes with DevOps. It helps businesses develop high-performance and high-quality software in a short period with fast and quality delivery.
What is functional testing?
Functional testing is a form of testing and a quality assurance process that helps validate a system or components against the various operating features and requirements specified. Functional testing in software testing is a type of black-box testing software, a quality assurance method used to evaluate software performance and its related components. The purpose of this type of test is to verify the effectiveness of the application against the needs of the business by providing specific inputs and outputs verification. In simple terms, this test form confirms that the software works the way users expect it. Since this type of test is based entirely on system specificity, this is also known as specification-based testing. In this testing process, QA engineers focus on validating the system against performance specifications and verifying features against a specific user specification set.
Why Functional Testing is required?
The need for functional testing is vital to ensure the quality and performance of the software. Through this software testing process, quality assurance teams verify software performance based on Software Requirements (SRS) and ensure that the system operates as a user specification.
This type of test helps check if the system is fixed for deployment and is bug-free. This testing does not depend on any speculations about the structure of the system, however, it ensures the delivery of a high-quality product. This testing method is used to test usability features and specific bug conditions and evaluates accessibility features along with performing tests for other functions of the software.
Why do businesses need functional testing?
- Helps to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of the application/software/product
- Helps to improve software quality
- Helps to verify software performance based on Software Requirements (SRS) and ensures system performance as user specification
- Helps to check for bug fixes and other software functions
- Helps to acquire fully functional flawless software to deliver the best CX
Significance of Functional testing in Agile
In traditional test models such as the waterfall model, software development and its testing is done sequentially, and usually, testing begins after the development process is completely over. In agile methodology, the product is developed simultaneously and tested in sprints, and the features get deployed in each cycle.
In an Agile environment, eventually, developers upgrade software, add new features, or perform code upgrades, while at the same time, on the other hand, testers perform functional software testing. If some changes are introduced to the software, a backing test is performed to ensure that the existing software performance remains unaffected.
Common types of functional testing that apply to the software environment include smoke, sanity, unit, component, etc. Functional testing speeds up the software testing process, ensures early identification and error detection, improves teamwork and saves time.
Significance of functional testing in DevOps
In the DevOps area, the main focus is building, testing, and deploying software quickly and often. DevOps simplifies and automates the entire software delivery life cycle by integrating it with the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline. At DevOps, everything from development to software deployment is continuous and automated. Software is continuously developed, tested, integrated, implemented, and monitored.
Automatic performance testing is performed at each phase of the DevOps CI / CD pipeline to ensure software quality. During the development phase, unit tests get conducted to verify the quality of the code. Also, in the DevOps area, developers often make changes to the source code and incorporate those code changes into the repository. Regression testing ensures that code changes do not violate existing software functionality. In the ongoing integration phase, integration testing ensures the proper integration of all codes and modules. Finally, all the software gets tested using system testing techniques to ensure its effectiveness of the software. It is how functional testing fits in the DevOps environment and helps businesses acquire high-quality software.
Few benefits of Functional testing in DevOps include:
Helping to remove software malfunctions early and quickly, ensuring software quality from the build stage to the release phase, delivering fully functional software in less time, and eliminating chances of manual errors, as the process is automatic, and saves valuable time and costs.
Conclusion
Today’s businesses adopt DevOps and Agile processes to achieve quality software in less time. But the quality of the software depends on its proper performance, which can be ensured by end-to-end performance testing. This type of testing helps businesses in many ways, such as improving software performance, improving customer experience, and saving high costs. Thus, companies should use the functional testing from next-generation QA and an independent software testing services provider like us to develop high-quality software in lesser time.
