Highlighting regulatory or legal functions

 

The purpose of Functional Testing is to find discrepancies

between how the software has been implemented, and

the functional specification. This is not the same as

user acceptance testing which often highlights differences

between the design of the functional specification and

what the users actually want. Indeed users may accept

some function testing failures, at least in the short term,

as long as user acceptance shows that the software does

what they want. Ultimately however software that fails to

do what it was designed to do will cause problems for the

business. In many industries the functional specification

may cover regulatory or legal business functions and therefore a failure to test can have widespread

ramifications.

Best practice sees function testing designed in

Function testing can be a difficult phase of the development cycle – particularly if it is only carried out

shortly before potential go live dates. Deadlines are tight, the customer and management may want

to release the code, programming is complete, but QA are still finding problems. Management 

temptation is always there to cut back on testing, but this is the only time to find problems that will

surface perhaps weeks or months after a release. Best practice therefore demands that function

testing being designed and scheduled in to the software development cycle from the start.