Performance Testing Vs Functional Testing
An Ideal Software testing process has to be a holistic approach that involves combination of various testing techniques to achieve a high quality software. Broadly speaking, testing of any application can be broken down on the basis of two premises – “Operability” and “Efficiency”. “Operability” is taken care of by functional testing and “Efficiency” is taken care of by performance testing.
Functional Testing evaluates individual and cohesive behaviour functions of a software system to verify that they adhere to pre-defined specifications. It tests the functional accuracy, interoperability of subsystems and compliance with pre-defined standards in the context of functional and business requirements.
Performance testing is a non-functional testing technique that exercises a system and then, measures, validates and verifies the response time, stability, scalability, speed and reliability of the system in production-like environment.
In this article, we will assess the differences between Performance and Functional testing.
Performance Testing Functional Testing Objective Validates performance Validates behaviour Focus Area User expectations User requirements Test data input Performance requirements Functional Requirements Test Execution Sequence Done after functional testing Done before performance testing Testing Approach Automation preferred Manual or Automated or Crowdsource Production test environment emulation Preferred Not mandatory Infrastructural requirements High Minimal Time taken for testing Less More Impact of functional Requirement changes No Yes Testing Tools examples LoadRunner, Jmeter Selenium, QTP, WinRunner
Conclusion
On close observation of the above table, it can be noticed that both the testing types complement each other. Performance testing validates that application software can handle real time scenarios and address issues, if any, to deliver a robust and efficient product to the end users. Functional testing on the other hand ensures the validity of software as per the functional and business requirements. Read for more : what are performance tests Webomates CQ, a tool by Webomates is used for performing regression testing for all the domains. Request a demo today.