While software testing is not an official Business Analysis skill set, it is one of the skills that every effective Business Analyst should have.
Software testing is the act of testing the application features to ensure that they would fulfill the stated requirements.
While there are numerous types of application tests, most business analysts will only be actively involved in functional testing.
What is Functional Testing?
Functional Testing is a type of software testing that checks the software system against the verified functional requirements.
These tests are used to validate the software application functionalities by inputting test data and verifying the results against the functional requirements.
So what is tested during a Functional Test ?
The functional tests is meant to fulfill the following objectives :
- Basic Usability: It is m important to test the basic usability of the application such as how easy it is for a new user to create an account, resetting your account password, how descriptive and self explanatory the error messages are. It is also used to check if a user can freely navigate through the screens without any difficulties.
- The main functions: the main functions of the application also need to be tested to ensure that they are working properly. These functionalities include such as the ability to log in, ability to create a new user account, completing a transaction, receiving the expected email and text notifications, approving a pending document approval and does the application validate basic information such postal code.
So how do you perform a Functional Test ?
You should start your functional testing by identifying and understanding the functional requirements.
Ideally you should have documented requirements which you can convert into test cases which would be used to create your test scripts.
A test script is a set of instructions that describe what is being tested and the expected result of the test.
Once you have your test scripts then you can execute the test scripts.
Test scripts can be executed either manually or automatically depending on the testing method being used.
Once the tests are completed, you should compare the test case results against the expected outcome and identify any discrepancies.
these identified discrepancies can be shared share with the development team who would fix these identified issues.