Partner for Software Testing

QAlified is a Uruguayan IT business that provides software testing services. Software testing is an essential part of a software development life cycle. Testing is how you can be confident about functionality, performance, and user experience. Whether you conduct your tests manually or through automation, the sooner and more often you can conduct tests, the more likely you are to identify errors, not only preventing headaches for you and your team, but also making sure that your software application has been thoroughly reviewed and audited before it is in front of your users. If the problems creep into the production environment, the more expensive and time consuming the solutions will be.

Software tests provided by companies like QAlified can be divided into two different types: functional and non-functional tests. Different aspects of a software application require different types of tests, such as performance tests, scalability tests, integration tests, unit tests, and many more. Each of these types of software tests offers excellent visibility into the application, from code to user experience.

Functional testing

Functional tests are conducted to verify business-critical features, functionality, and usability. Functional tests ensure that the features and functionalities of the software behave as expected, without any problems. It mainly validates the entire application against the specifications mentioned in the Software Requirement Specification (SRS) document. The types of functional tests include unit tests, interface tests and regression tests, among others.

Unit tests

Unit testing focuses on testing individual parts / units of a software application at the beginning of the SDLC. Any function, procedure, method, or module can be a unit that is tested for correctness and expected behavior. Unit tests are the first tests that developers perform during the development phase.

Integration testing

Integration testing implicates testing the diverse software modules as a group. A software application is made up of different sub-modules that work together for different functionalities. The purpose of integration testing is to validate the integration of different modules together and to identify the errors and problems related to them.

Non-functional tests

Non-functional tests are like functional tests; however, the main difference is that those functions are tested under load for observer performance, reliability, usability, scalability, and so on. Non-functional testing, such as load and stress testing, is typically performed using automation tools and solutions. Apart from performance tests, other non-functional test types are reliability tests, installation tests and security tests.

Performance Testing

Performance tests are a category of non-functional tests, which are performed to determine the stability, speed and scalability of a software. As the name proposes, its main goal is to check an application performance against several network and system benchmarks such as page load speed, CPU utilization, server resource utilization, control peak traffic, etc. Within performance tests, there are several other types of tests, such as load tests and stress tests.

How these test types differ from each other ?

You may have some idea about the different types of tests mentioned above. All the tests are focused on the reliability and readiness of software applications, however, we will better understand the differences between them through some examples. Let's say you have an eCommerce website / application with standard functionalities. Here are some examples of performance tests, functional tests, integration tests, and unit tests:

If you want to check how your website will perform when a high number of users enter it, for example during the sales season, you should perform load tests, which fall under the category of performance tests. This type of test is useful to detect stability and speed issues, as well to remove possible performance bottlenecks.

Imagine you want to test the input and output for each specific functionality such as login, registration, add to cart, payment processing, checkout, database entries, etc. based on test cases written in the SRS document. In that case, you must perform functional tests.

If you want to validate the functionality of the cart with the integration of the payment and payment module to see if the number of items added to the cart is purchased correctly with the correct payment, you must perform integration tests.

If you have written a module for the product loading process, and you want to test if it is working correctly, which means that the products are successfully added without any kind of mistakes, you have to perform unit tests for the product loading module.

In short, performance tests are performed to check the performance of the website. Functional tests are performed to validate all functionalities. Integration tests are performed to validate the interaction between different modules, and unit tests are performed to check whether individual pieces of code are correct.