It is natural, no matter what field we are working in, we all hate documentation! Mostly we believe it’s a waste of time to build and write documents. We all think putting more time into actually doing a project is a lot more beneficial than wasting time on documentation. But in the software and app development lifecycle or SDLC ,one of the most critical and crucial stages is the writing of testing documentation. Of course, the documentation does not look as practical as building an MVP, but it is as essential as any other experimental stage.
What Is Testing Documentation?
Testing documentation is one of the artifacts made during or before testing. For professionals, testing is not just various code sections on an ad-hoc basis then verifying the results. But a very formal part of the project and should be documented in detail.
With documentation, you build a bridge between your organization and the prospect. With proper regular documentation, the risk gets lower. Hence the projects with documentation turn out to have better quality and performance.
With the help of a testing document, the testing team can estimate the necessitated testing effort, testing coverage, tracking resources, accomplishment flow, etc. The testing document is a comprehensive series of reports that allows you to describe and record test outlining, test design, test accomplishment, and test conclusions.
The QA team involves in the initial stages, and the testing documentation should be a parallel effort.
A testing document might need regular updates with version control. This documentation should be available to all the team members. We recommend using a standard template for your testing documentation. With a template, you can keep track of the details you need to pay attention to.
A BRS documentation is designed as a collaboration between the business analyst interaction with the customers.
This document includes the business rules, the scope of the project, and the client’s requirements in detail.An SRS document is extracted from the Business Requirements Specification Document with the help of the business analysts and the project manager. This SRS document Should also include the Functional Requirements Specification (FRS).
With the help of the QA team from the SRS document, the initial version of the test plan is extracted.
SRS Document and Testing Scenarios:
Test scenarios are templated, one-line indicators of ‘what to test’ for specific functionality. It is necessary to extract the testing scenarios from the Software Requirement Specification Document. The SRS document is not a project plan. Therefore, this document works as a guide for system architecture and development; so, it does not use the SRS document for timelines or deliverables.
By going through different sections of the SRS document, you should detect the testable requirements.
For example, according to the IEEE SRS template, you can download it from here. The first section, Introduction, includes the document’s purpose, the project overview, project audience, and project scope, none of which provide testable requirements.
In section 2, Overall Description, look for user actions and objectives. Discover the characteristics of the technical requirements—picture possible scenarios of system abuse and estimate users from the perspective of a hacker.
After looking and requiring documents from an analytic point of view, make a list of different scenarios based on each software feature.
After making a list of test scenarios, a Traceability Matrix is made.
According to Guru 99, “A Traceability Matrix is a document that correlates any two baseline copies that require a many-to-many relationship to check the completeness of the relationship.”
While reviewing the SRS, keep these steps in mind:
- Go through all the information you built your SRS from. Don’t leave anything out.
- Perform feasibility analysis on whether a specific requirement is correct or not and whether it is testable.
- Testing scenarios are not just based on functional requirements. If there is no individual performance or security team, make sure to consider non-functional requirements.
- While building testing scenarios, make sure to separate the testable info from not tastable materials.
- The number of test cases and their importance to patients do not need to be precise.
- Do not share the test scenarios with business analysts or the development team. They are only for internal QA consumption.
- Test scenario building counts as a manual activity. However, you can use different test management tools like qTest.
- Each scenario should be tied to a minimum of one user story or requirement. Even if you made scenarios for multi scenarios, make sure to have individual testing to test a condition in isolation.
- Based on the customer priorities, select good testing scenarios.
What Is Functional Testing?
Functional testing mainly involved black boxes.
The functional testing does not concern the source code of the application. With this testing technique, the function of the software or the application gets verified. In functional testing test User Interface, APIs, Database, Security, Client/Server Applications, and the Application Under Test functionality. You can perform the functional testing either manually or automatically.
What Is Non-Functional Testing?
In testing, there needs to be a non-functional testing plan.
The non-functional aspects such as performance, usability, reliability and other factors should get tested. Non-functional testing examines the readiness of the system as per non-functional parameters. The functional testing does not include non-functional parameters.
For example, the number of simultaneous login of users should be tested.
What Are The Differences Between Functional and Non-Functional Testing?
First off, the functional testing happened before the non-functional testing.
| Functional Testing | Non-functional testing |
| Test for function and feature of the software | Testing non-functional aspects like performance, usability, reliability, etc |
| Functional testing can be done manually | Non-functional testing should be performed automatically |
| The test is based on the customer’s requirements. | The test is based on the customer’s expectations. |
| Functional testing validates software action | The non-functional testing validates the software performance. |
| Testing what is the function of the product | Testing how the product function |
Let’s go through examples of functional and non-functional testing:
| Example of Functional Testing | Example of Non-functional Testing |
| Smoke Testing | Performance Testing |
| User Acceptance | Volume Testing |
| Integration Testing | Scalability |
| Regression Testing | Usability Testing |
| Unit Testing | Load Testing |
| Localization | Stress Testing |
| Globalization | Compliance Testing |
| Interoperability | Probability Testing |
WINaTALENT puts a lot of effort into building the testing documentation. With the help of the testing documentation, the estimation effort needed, test coverage, resource tracking and execution progress are known to the stakeholders, the QA team, and the project manager.
With the help of documentation, the estimation of costs and resources will become more accurate. Also, it would be easier to fix defects at the early stages.