User experience (UX) isn’t just a catchphrase. In today’s competitive market, it’s a key requirement for business success. A company’s UX is the sum total of each customer’s interaction with its products, services, brand, and representatives. Positive UX leads to loyalty, higher spending per purchase, and good reviews, all of which result in more revenue for you. So, the more you can do to make customers happy, the better.
That includes software that works as expected every time. To ensure optimal performance for software designed specifically for your company, you need to hire the best developers or software development firm. Here we explore functional testing and how it can help you achieve better UX.
What Are Functional Testing Services?
A critical part of the software development process must be thorough testing. Performance testing examines backend processes that can cause frustration for the user when they’re not up to speed. While performance testing is highly important, functional testing may be more so because it ensures all the user interface (UI) components of an application work as intended.
Functional testing services are performed to determine whether the software meets functional specifications determined in advance by developers and stakeholders. While it may be executed by the developers who created the software, it’s better performed by a separate team that can be more objective in its inquiries.
Ideally, development and testing should be performed by teams that usually don’t work together. Functional testing can include a review of the following items:
User Interface
This type of testing includes trials to ensure all screens, buttons, and forms perform as expected. For example, testers determine whether it’s easy for users to navigate between screens and whether links take them to an expected location.
Login
With this component, testers try various login methods to make sure users are able to easily start their software session.
Primary Functions
Here, testers are looking for an answer to the question, “Does the software do what it’s supposed to do?” In other words, if it’s an inventory control system, does it allow users to perform inventory control?
Payment
For e-commerce sites, payment is critical. You don’t want customers going through the process of collecting items in their cart and then abandoning it because the payment process is too confusing. These tests examine the payment function to ensure the process is smooth and easy to understand.
Errors
While you don’t want users to encounter errors in your software, it’s important to know what kinds of actions will produce one and what error message users see when it happens. This type of testing determines what to expect in both of those scenarios.
Functional Testing Types
To arrive at the conclusions mentioned above, those who provide functional testing services employ manual and automatic tests of various types. Each one checks for slightly different aspects of the software, and each one can potentially uncover problems for developers to fix. Testing types include the following.
Sanity Testing
Sanity testing is used as a “quick and dirty” test when there isn’t time to do a more thorough investigation. Users operate the software as a user would and note any surface-level problems. Sanity testing may also be used to ensure software modifications have fixed issues they were meant to resolve.
Smoke Testing
Smoke testing is used to determine if each discrete component of the software operates as it should. Typically, it’s performed before other types of testing to detect obvious problems upfront.
Unit Testing
While other types of testing examine the user-facing aspects of software, unit testing ensures that each component (or “unit”) of the application code works as expected.
Regression Testing
Sometimes fixing one part of an application can break another. Regression testing checks to ensure that updates don’t cause additional problems elsewhere in the program.
System Testing
This type of testing is designed to be performed within an entire system, rather than on the software in isolation. It shows whether the system meets technical, functional, and business requirements as previously defined by the developer and stakeholders.
User Acceptance Testing
Typically performed as the last test, user acceptance testing runs the software through “real-world” scenarios that customers or employees are likely to bring. While other tests are more theory-based, user acceptance testing is rooted in users’ reality.
Better Software Means Better UX
Clearly, testing can make software better by shoring up backend functions and removing problems with the frontend interface. These tests and the improvements that follow prevent user frustration with a wide variety of challenges, such as not being able to use the software as they had planned, finding it difficult to know which button to select, or even having the software crash because the server can’t handle a large number of users.
Each time a user gets frustrated, they have a negative experience, which removes “points” from their overall UX, or impression of your company. For example, say you have a web application for your financial firm that enables customers to apply for a mortgage loan. If the operation is seamless and the final screen promises a lender will call to discuss the application, then a representative follows up, and the customer has all their expectations met, resulting in a positive UX.
If, on the other hand, the customer fills out one screen and can’t figure out how to advance, or if they send the application not understanding the next step in the application process, or if a follow-up call is promised but not completed, the customer will become frustrated, resulting in a negative UX. That customer is unlikely to do business with your company now or ever. Furthermore, they may tell others about their unpleasant experience or even write a bad review.
Testing is often thought of as an add-on but, as we’ve seen here, it can be critically important to avoid common problems and prevent negative customer UX.
