Tips For Functional Testing
If you are a QA professional that is interested in getting the most out of his or her time testing, there is a good chance that you have looked into functional testing or automated testing. These will allow you to perform a lot of the tests at the same time, which will allow you to cover more ground and get more done. Here are some tips for setting up the functional testing design so that your tests are as efficient as possible.
1. Make Your Waiting Smarter
When you need to make certain calls to certain databases or APIs, you might need to wait awhile for the appropriate results to return. Your first thought might be to simply have the program go to sleep for a few seconds. However, this is a bad practice because there is a chance that the program will receive the information it needs from the database before the waiting period has expired, meaning that the program will be waiting for no particular reason. The information might also not be returned until after the waiting period has expired, which also means that the program will be idle and possibly crash. Instead of building in a pause, simply have your program wait until a particular piece of information shows up.
2. Don't Use Conditionals
The next thing that you should do is try to not use conditionals. You are testing to find inconsistencies in the behavior of the service. In order for conditionals to work, you will need to actually know the exact behavior of your program, which is impossible since that's what you're testing for in the first place. Instead of using conditionals to check for erroneous behavior, log the behavior and then write additional tests to further explore it. Keep these tests for similar use cases in the future and build your testing library.
3. Use Regular Expressions for Sort Orders
For many programs, things need to happen in a specific order. This means that you will need to label your programs so that they do actually occur in this order. When you are checking for the labels, you will need to use regular expressions to get the information that you need or else the string pattern matching is not going to be successful.
For more information, talk to a company that specializes in functional testing. They will be able to help you develop a suite of tests for your software needs.
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