Performance Testing Vs Functional Testing

 An Ideal Software testing process has to be a holistic approach that involves combination of various testing techniques to achieve a high quality software. Broadly speaking, testing of any application can be broken down on the basis of two premises – “Operability” and “Efficiency”. “Operability” is taken care of by functional testing and “Efficiency” is taken care of by performance testing.

Functional Testing evaluates individual and cohesive behaviour functions of a software system to verify that they adhere to pre-defined specifications. It tests the functional accuracy, interoperability of subsystems and compliance with pre-defined standards in the context of functional and business requirements.

Performance testing is a non-functional testing technique that exercises a system and then, measures, validates and verifies the response time, stability, scalability, speed and reliability of the system in production-like environment. 

In this article, we will assess the differences between Performance and Functional testing.

	Performance Testing	Functional Testing
Objective	Validates performance	Validates behaviour
Focus Area	User expectations	User requirements
Test data input	Performance requirements	Functional Requirements
Test Execution Sequence	Done after functional testing	Done before performance testing
Testing Approach	Automation preferred	Manual or Automated or Crowdsource
Production test environment emulation	Preferred	Not mandatory
Infrastructural requirements	High	Minimal
Time taken for testing	Less	More
Impact of functional Requirement changes	No	Yes
Testing Tools examples	LoadRunner, Jmeter	Selenium, QTP, WinRunner

Conclusion

On close observation of the above table, it can be noticed that both the testing types complement each other. Performance testing validates that  application software can handle real time scenarios and address issues, if any, to deliver a robust and efficient product to the end users. Functional testing on the other hand ensures the validity of software as per the functional and business requirements. Read for more : what are performance tests

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