Functional Testing Service: How to Ensure a Smooth User Flow

As an essential part of a complete software testing service, functional testing has a special place on your product development roadmap. Quality product functionalities are critical to your software’s success. You should make sure that all of your product’s functionalities operate properly, and that your software complies with industry standards.

In this post, we discuss:

1. Essential software quality characteristics
2. The importance of quality product functionalities
3. Benefits of functional testing for your business
4. Types of functional testing
5. Proven tips for testing product functionality to ensure a smooth user flow

Let’s find out how to make your functionality responsive, make a profit, and provide a top-level user experience.

Six Important Product Quality Attributes

Quality is an important requirement for a product that can make your business successful. Here is a list of important quality attributes or quality characteristics that influence your software’s success at every stage of product development.

1. Functionality

Functionality attributes refer to the software’s ability to solve users’ pain points. Core software functions are necessary to ensure proper operation, handle data loading, and comply with product guidelines and industry requirements.

2. Reliability

Reliability attributes determine how your software performs required tasks under certain conditions, for a specific number of operations, and their duration.

3. Usability

Usability attributes measure the ability of users to easily and conveniently interact with your product.

4. Efficiency

The efficiency attributes are the ability of your software to deliver a certain level of performance with the given time and resources.

5. Maintainability

Maintainability is a quality attribute that facilitates analysis, maintenance, and testing of your software, finding and fixing bugs.

6. Portability

The final quality attribute is portability, which characterizes software in terms of ease of portability between two environments, such as between software and hardware.

In addition, it is important to adhere to quality requirements in a complete test suite. With a complete package of software testing services, you can not only guarantee the quality of your product but also achieve three other goals at the same time:

• Fix software problems in a timely manner
• Reduce development costs
• Provide an excellent user experience

What is Functional Testing?

Every time a user performs an action with your software, it is important that your product responds as expected and as documented in product specifications. QA engineers use functional testing to verify that software functionality works in accordance with product requirements.

In other words, functional testing verifies what the software is supposed to do. The goal of functional testing is to ensure that your app’s feature set provides a seamless user flow and is ready to be released.

When we refer to functionality, we mean all software functions, accessibility, the user interface, APIs, and error conditions. QA teams can write test scripts and create business scenarios to test product functionality using manual or automated methods. Regardless of which testing approach you choose, manual or automated, the QA team can understand how software behaves and meets customer expectations and business needs.

For more information on this topic, you can read about future-oriented, maintenance-free approaches to automated functional testing to understand how functional testing can work in practice and how you can build it into your existing processes.

Benefits of Functional Testing for your Business

The following benefits await your business as a result of QA testing activities.

1. Reputation as a dedicated company

Your software company’s reputation is especially valuable for securing your position in the market and attracting the attention of users.

2. Predictability

Your software’s predictability increases when the product’s user flow is smooth, and the development team is freed from reworking tasks. In turn, software’s predictability can also lead to cost and time savings.

3. Minimized costs and time

Not surprisingly, the fewer bugs you find in the later stages of software development, the more profitable and efficient your software will be.

4. Improved customer service

A quality product is always a priority choice for users. By focusing on quality during the product development process, you can build a pool of loyal customers and increase your sales.

5. Profitability

If you maintain your product’s quality, you can be sure that your business will have an early return on investment and significant opportunities for development.

Software Functionality Workflow

Based on our extensive QA testing experience, we’ve prepared a clear step-by-step guide on properly testing software functionality and getting a fast and successful release.

Original infographic idea taken from Tech Quality Pedia.

1. Considering functional product requirements

Before creating a software functionality test plan, your test team should make a list of specific features, accessibility items, and bug conditions to test. The next step is to specify how your users will perform software functions.

2. Creating test data

At this stage, the QA team must determine acceptable exit criteria for each functional item selected for testing under the specified product requirements.

3. Writing and executing test cases

Next, your team proceeds with the core functional testing phase and writes test cases based on manual or automated testing methods. After that, they should record test results after each test is executed.

4. Comparing expected test results with actual input values

This step is about validating test results. Testers can compare expected results with actual input values, then refine this match against the original product requirements. Any differences found between expected and actual results should be marked accordingly.

5. Logging defects

Consider all identified errors and functionality that does not work as expected. If necessary, testers should notify developers of the need for further product improvements.

Types of Functional Testing

We cover a wide range of functional testing services to make your application work as required. Regardless of your project and software requirements, we suggest paying attention to the following types of testing:

• Acceptance testing

Acceptance testing lets testers understand if an application meets customer expectations.

• Regression testing

Regression testing is especially useful for checking whether existing functionality works as expected and whether a new build affects the software.

• Smoke testing

Smoke testing is a way for testers to check the readiness and stability of software for performing other QA activities.

• UI testing

With UI testing, you can test all of your software’s visual elements and requirements and understand how users interact with the software.

• Exploratory testing

Through exploratory testing, QA professionals can test the system’s handling of various scenarios.

Conclusion

Functional testing is an integral part of the software development cycle. Functional testing checks your software against functional requirements to ensure that all features work correctly and meet user needs. Consider using functional testing services to prevent losses after release, add value to your software, and strengthen your company's reputation.