How to Involve Non-functional Testing?

April 01 10:00 2011 by Nataliia Vasylyna Print This Article

Software quality can be enhanced by different approaches that differ from functional testing, such as technical performance analysis, security testing, usability testing.

What is Non-functional Testing?

Non-functional testing is an extensive part of software testing that obscures a lot of different aspects of software behavior. Some of the most usual non-functional tests that are identified and conducted on a regular basis are performance, capacity, and failover tests.

At present many IT projects disregard to test extra non-functional characteristics of the systems they implement, such as sustainability / soak test, recovery and operability.

The area of non-functional behavior showed by an application and system combination is immense and further complicated by the sudden nature of events taking place in the target production environment.

In a perfect world we would have an entire set of non-functional requirements that defines all elements of application behavior in a given environment and systems composition under a variety of custom patterns.

Reality of Non-functional Testing

The reality is that, at the best, project teams are faced with a lean minimum set of requirements that define the expected response time for a set of critical online functions, a batch processing window, and high-level availability requirements.

You should use another method that is different than the traditional functional requirements collecting and specification is required to get a list of non-functional requirements.

Moreover to the minimum set of tests above, there are many extra tests that are critical to understanding and verifying the non-functional behavior of your application and system.

What Do We Advise?

We believe that non-functional types of testing should be paid no less time than the functional testing and these efforts should be planned in the early stages of development.

Main types of non-functional testing :

• Performance testing (load testing, etc.)
• Failover testing
• Usability testing,
• Testing of Information Security.

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