First of all, based on the title, it doesn’t mean to choose between unit testing and functional testing. Let’s admit that both have their own importance in software development. One thing I would like to highlight is that many developers think that unit tests are not useful and waste of time. James Coplien wrote the blog “Why Most Unit Testing is Waste” and it drove huge discussion on Reddit and Hacker News. The whole developer community was divided into two sides: Unit testing supporters and Unit testing Haters.

However, in functional testing, we don’t have contrary opinions. Functional testing is done from the user’s perspective and its utility is well understood by users, developers and QA alike. But at the end users only care about the functionality and UI of the application.

Read More

“Success in automated functional testing is less about getting it right and more about avoiding mistakes”. Selection of the right functional testing tool is one of the crucial decisions you make for automated functional testing. If it goes wrong, you pay hard. Because every functional testing tool has some limitations you might overlook some hidden problems.

In selecting a tool, you have a set of selection constraints, which can be classified into hard and soft constraints. Hard constraints are fixed and must be satisfied in any case. These constraints include executing environments, programming languages, platforms, and framework used to build the application. The Soft constraints include cost, maintainability, usability, schedule, level of programming and technical skills required. These constraints can be compromised or partially met.

Read More

Yesterday while working with my QA team, I had an epiphany that how often we get functional testing wrong. Instead of working out a balanced testing strategy we take the simple approach of ‘testing the product the same way a real customer would use it’. I believe though an enticing statement emulating the customer experience has its own costs. The functional testing is costly and time consuming if your organization is still doing it manually. But the costs can be remarkably reduced by implementing automated functional testing.

While working on software delivery projects, we will eventually face the decision of which tests should be automated to get the higher ROI. Also, to automate the functional testing you must have a pre-defined roadmap and strategy to save time and test maintenance. In this blog, you will get to know about which tests should be automated and a roadmap to implement automated functional testing. Read More