QA Functional Testing

These days I’m reading a lot about software testing. Funny enough, I was so sure I was going to become a fullstack or  UI/UX designer but I became very interested in QA as well. I am a very creative and artistic person but I have always felt uncomfortable working in the creative field. Art and design becomes boring and stressful when you do it for a living and when your income is dependable on other people’s subjective opinions. Thankfully front end development is one thing and graphic design another. I love doing graphic design in my freetime. So I'm open to both paths and we'll see which one is going to be the one for me. 

So, testing. Some people find it unappealing or boring. Some people find it interesting only because it is often described as “easy” or a good “entry-level job”. Having explored multiple Youtube channels where real software testers describe their profession, I have come to the conclusion that testing is not easy and definitely not an easy entry-level job. When done well, it requires the tester to have deep knowledge and experience in the field. That’s my goal and one day I’ll be a top bug bounty hunter 🪲 (It’s so cool, I can’t wait)

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Here are some notes I made this week. If you are also interested in testing, I hope my notes are useful to you.

Functional testing aka black-box testing

Black-box testing is a type of functional testing. Imagine a black box which insides or technical aspects you cannot see. It’s different from non-functional testing aka white-box testing where the box is transparent and the code is visible to the tester, and which often uses automated testing tools. White-box testing is a more technical way of testing software.

The combination of the two is called grey-box testing where some areas of the code are known to the tester.

These days I’m concentrating on learning about functional testing as it is easier for a beginner like me and I can start doing my own experiments as soon as I know the basics.

Types of functional testing are:

• Smoke testing 🔥

• Day 0 check. Testing basic functionalities. Short and quick and concentrates on major areas of the product. Smoke testing can be done by both developers and testers. It is like a general health check-up done early-on.

• Sanity testing 🤪

• Checking the software after the initial build and smoke testing. Now the software is stable and testing can be done to inspect more specific areas. Sanity testing is done by testers. It is like a specialized health check-up.

• Regression testing 🔁

• Re-testing after changes have been made.

• Usability testing 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

• Testing on real users.

Functional testing techniques can be divided into:

POSITIVE TESTING - testing like an end-user with real inputs

and 

NEGATIVE TESTING - testing with wrong inputs + boundary value analysis

Next time I’m going to post about some exploratory testing I’m going to do! The sites I’m going to test are Finnish websites so probably I’ll write those posts in Finnish.

Example of functional testing

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