Functional Test Automation
Agile and continuous testing requires a test automation tool that can promise speed to automate and execute while ensuring minimal maintenance. Testing in the Agile world cannot lag far behind development – it must progress in parallel.
BeatBlip is a true Agile test automation solution that lets you test features as they are developed – without having to wait for a feature to be fully ready. It empowers you to not only test new features, or their parts, in a given sprint but also to run partial or full regression in a matter of minutes or hours.- In-built recorder: Allows users to automatically generate automated functional tests. A tester uses the system to exercise its functionality like an end-user, and BeatBlip auto-generates a corresponding automated test script. This allows the test teams to automate quickly. All they have to do is review the generated script and update it for more repeatable test input data to make the script robust.
- Enhances re-usability and reduces automation effort: Functional test cases often share many test steps. BeatBlip allows testers to create test suites, test cases, or test step batches that can be re-used i.e. accessed and executed as part of other tests. This avoids automation script proliferation and keeps the maintenance localized.
- Allows testing of features and functionality as they are added: Teams do not have to wait for an application to be fully complete, it can be tested right away. This ensures that test automation and testing progresses in parallel.
- Helps in running same test under multiple conditions: Data-driven capability of BeatBlip allows the testers to test the same functionality under multiple conditions without rewriting or duplicating the test cases.
- Accelerates the feedback Loop: With BeatBlip, the development team gets quicker feedback, from testing, both on new as well as existing functionality.
- Ensures complete testing: Apart from UI level verifications, BeatBlip also supports database level validation to ensure data-integrity along with the functional validation.
Functional testing is a type of automated testing that deals with how an application functions in relation to the users and the rest of the system. It ensures that an application works as it was designed, from the user’s perspective, by checking it from head to toe.
During this test, the developers can find answers to hard questions such as “can the users do what was expected of a particular feature,” “does the app actually work the way it was meant to,” or “are there other ways in which the app should work that the developer hadn’t even considered?”
While unit testing is meant to test both what an application segment does and how it is done, functional testing tests concentrate solely on what the application does. A functional test is not concerned with an application’s internal details.
- Smoke testing: Tests if major pieces of the application work well enough to move on to the next stage of testing.
- Sanity testing: Confirms that any code changes have not created new, serious issues in existing functionalities.
- Compatibility testing: Determines whether a product works across the devices or environments it’s required to support.
- Regression testing: A more in-depth version of smoke testing, meant to determine whether code changes have any negative impact on the application’s existing functionality.
- User Acceptance testing: Ensures that the application can handle required tasks in real-world scenarios, according to specifications.
- Ensures that the end-user or customer is satisfied
- Assures that the application is defect-free and fully functional
- Guarantees that all features and functions are performing as they should
- Confirms that the application works exactly as it was meant to
- Guarantees security and safety
- Improves the overall quality of the product
- Reduces the risks and losses associated with the application.
Functional Testing is an important testing process that ensures that all test scenarios including boundary cases and failure paths are accounted for. It tests in detail what an application ‘does’. Before running a functional test, the developers need to set benchmarks that are developer-independent to identify what has not been achieved yet, in terms of application functionality.
As users will ultimately run the application on a system along with various other applications and the application must endure different user loads, developers need to ensure that every function of the application is crash-resistant.
In an era when businesses are looking to expand their test coverage, save time and costs, retain the knowledge base, and aim for productivity improvement in testing, manual functional testing is no longer a viable option. Functional test automation can dramatically improve the turnaround time, quality, and stability of the application.