Software Testing plays a pivotal role in the course of any software or application development. This one-liner is enough to make you recognize the importance of Software Quality Assurance: Without carefully planned software testing solutions, you will not be able to promise to give a 100% desired customer experience to your global customer base.

Functional testing solutions help test features or functionality of an application or software to guarantee that meets the purpose and demand of its creation. All the potential prospects, comprising of product failure and boundary conditions are assessed in functional testing.

Of course, to test a product’s functionality, you need to provide certain inputs, observe the output, and compare the results received with the expected ones to assess if the application is a pass or fail.

Read on to get acquainted with those 7 worthwhile standard practices that prove useful when executing functional testing:

1. Gather information for performing the test

To begin with, it is essential to be aware of what needs to be tested and what the plan or procedure is for performing the test. The development team has all the information about critical user commands and processes. Gather all the necessary information needed to begin testing with the critical things first.

It is important to be aware of market demands for product development. Document or matrix should be prepared to link the product to the requirement and to the test cases. Matrices should be modified as per the changes in requirement.

2. Prepare a test plan and test cases

You must prepare a comprehensive test plan that encompasses all the details for performing the test that includes goals and scope of testing, number of people involved, and all necessary hardware and software tools involved in the testing. The test should also include the schedule of testing and also the number of test cases that need to be prepared written to perform testing.

Test cases are basically input data created on the basis of the application’s functionality specifications. These test cases should be arranged and ranked according to priority for reducing delays and risks. Once these test plans have been made, show them to the development team for review.

3. Execute the test

Your test plans and actual functionality should match for executing the test correctly. Test cases should be prepared in such a way that they can be modified when needed, according to the changing needs of the product. For deeper analysis, you can document all problems faced and their solutions.

4. Bring on automation testing

Automation testing helps to improve the product or application’s quality, and simultaneously save time. However, it is totally upon the tester to decide what areas should be put to automation testing, since it isn’t feasible to test everything automatically.

Automation testing is comparatively costlier, though ultimately serves as more beneficial for the software product.

5. Manage your defect reporting within a centralized data repository system

Since there is a team of testers and developers working on the product, and at times, the same functionality, it may result in duplication of defect reports, inappropriate order of issue solving, identification of wrong defects etc. The best strategy to adopt is to maintain a centralized data repository system, or a test management tool that everyone working on the project has access and visibility into.

A test management tool includes standard templates for defect reporting and verifying, ranking of defects according to priority and details on the project’s status. This helps in solving all issues as per their priority.

6. Reporting of test results

A test result report is accessible in a specific format that covers a summary of all test cases executed and the timestamps against each stage for each feature with its status and progress. It also gives details of any new bug or defect identified during testing.

Generally, a test result report needs to be written in a clear and simple way, without technical jargons, for easier understanding of the development team.

7. Analysis

Any problems or difficulties and possibilities in both testing and development can be easily be distinguished during analysis. It helps in refining procedures practiced in product development, making the application product a total success.