Types of Software Tests: Differences and Examples

Testing is how you can be sure of functionality, performance and user experience. Whether you perform your tests manually or by automation, the sooner and more often you can perform tests, the more bugs and errors you will identify, not only by saving you and your team from potential fire drills later, but also by ensuring that your software application has been carefully examined and verified before being in front of your users. If the problems are summed up in the production environment, the more expensive and longer they will be to solve.

Software tests can be divided into two different types: functional and non-functional tests. Different aspects of a software application require different types of testing, such as performance tests, scalability tests, integration tests, unit tests, and much more. Each of these types of software tests offers excellent visibility on your application, from code to user experience. Let’s go into the details of some of the most common types of software tests.

Types of software tests: functional and non-functional tests

Functional tests

Functional tests are carried out by software testing services company to verify the company’s critical features, features and ease of use. Also, functional tests ensure that software features and functionalities behave as expected without any problems. It mainly validates the entire application against the specifications mentioned in the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) document. Types of functional tests include unit tests, interface tests, regression tests, and many others.

Unit tests

Unit tests focus on testing the individual parts/units of a software application at the beginning of the SDLC. Any function, procedure, method or module can be a unit to undergo unit tests to determine its accuracy and expected behavior. The unit test is the first test that developers perform during the development phase.

Integration tests

The integration test consists of testing different modules of a software application as a group. A software application is composed of different submodels that work together for different features. The purpose of integration tests is to validate the integration of the different modules together and to identify bugs and related problems.

Non-functional tests

Non-functional tests are like functional tests; however, the main difference is that these functions are tested under load to observe performance, reliability, ease of use, scalability, etc. Non-functional tests, such as load and stress tests, are usually carried out using automation tools and solutions, such as LoadView. In addition to performance tests, the types of non-functional tests include installation tests, reliability tests and safety tests.

Performance tests

Performance tests are a type of non-functional test, carried out to determine the speed, stability and scalability of a software application. As its name suggests, the overall objective of this test is to verify the performance of an application against different system and network benchmarks such as processor usage, page loading speed, peak traffic management, use of server resources, etc. In performance testing as a service, there are several other types of tests, such as load tests and stress tests.

How these types of tests differ from each other

Suppose you have an e-commerce website/application with standard features. If you want to check how your website will happen when a large number of users come to your website, for example, during the sales season, you must perform load tests. It will help you detect speed and stability problems and eliminate potential performance bottlenecks.

Suppose you want to validate the entry and output of each feature such as registration, connection, add to cart, checkout, payment processing, database entries, etc., depending on the test cases written in the SRS document. In this case, you must perform functional tests.

If you want to validate the functionality of the cart with the integration of the checkout and payment module to see if the number of items added to the cart are successfully purchased with a correct payment, you must do integration tests.

If you have written a module for product download and want to check if it is correct and the products are successfully added without any bugs or defects, you must do unit tests for the product download module.

To summarize, performance tests are carried out to verify the performance of the website. Functional tests are carried out to validate all the features. Integration tests are carried out to validate the interaction between the different modules, and unit tests are carried out to verify the accuracy of the individual pieces of code.