It is estimated that there will be roughly 6 billion mobile users by 2024. This means that there are going to be a lot more apps and a lot more competition. There is a need of quality at speed in mobile app testing to match up the user expectations. While functional tests assures that the app works smoothly, automation helps in speeding up the QA process to a great extend. Before we understand how automation helps in optimizing the QA efforts, let’s understand what is functional testing.
What is Functional Testing?
It is a quality assurance process and a type of black-box testing that bases its test cases on the specifications of the AUT. Inputs are fed to check the functions and examining the output. Functional testing is conducted to evaluate the compliance of a system with specified requirements.
Test Automation for Functional Testing
In functional testing, there are a lot of repeated checks that a QA will have to spend time to run over and over again. Humans executing it manually will take a lot of time and there is a lot of scope for mistakes. Fast feedback is required for successful integration strategy and continuous delivery.
As we look at the Mike Cohn’s pyramid we know that there are more unit then integration or UI tests. Continuous integration requires test automation as it is easy to re-execute all the cases if there are any small changes. Functional tests can create a huge set of check cases. Regression suite will take a lot of time to run if for each new story we add a small set of functional tests after some iterations. A long running regression suite is an issue when committing changes. As a consequence, developers will commit less frequently, with larger commits. The test automation tool must provide support for all the practices being used that may include web-based user interfaces and services, databases, mobile or thick client applications, etc.
It is critical to check that the chosen automation tool provides robust reporting for every execution cycle, test case and suite, across multiple builds and execution cycles. The reports must capture the correct status of the software being tested at all stages of execution, help the stakeholders to make well-informed decisions.
Conclusion
To optimize functional testing it is important to include automation for repetitive checks. Otherwise it is just a waste of resources and time. The best option to automate it is by using a cloud based platform like pCloudy. A cloud based platform will solve the issue of variety of devices to test the app and makes it easier to perform functional testing on real devices using automation.
