Abhijit Dongre, Author at Bitwise Technology Consulting and Data Management Services Fri, 15 Mar 2024 07:20:17 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://cdn2.bitwiseglobal.com/bwglobalprod-cdn/2022/12/cropped-cropped-bitwise-favicon-32x32.png Abhijit Dongre, Author at Bitwise 32 32 Functional vs. Non-Functional Testing for Quality Assurance https://www.bitwiseglobal.com/en-us/blog/functional-vs-non-functional-testing-for-quality-assurance/ https://www.bitwiseglobal.com/en-us/blog/functional-vs-non-functional-testing-for-quality-assurance/#respond Mon, 05 Oct 2020 10:59:00 +0000 https://www.bitwiseglobal.com/en-us/functional-vs-non-functional-testing-for-quality-assurance/ Functional Testing At its simplest form, Functional Testing does just what its name implies: tests the software or a component of the software to ensure it is functioning as expected. Functional Testing can apply to web and mobile applications; responsive user interfaces (UI); software designed using service-oriented architecture (SOA), APIs and microservices; as well as ... Read more

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Functional Testing

At its simplest form, Functional Testing does just what its name implies: tests the software or a component of the software to ensure it is functioning as expected. Functional Testing can apply to web and mobile applications; responsive user interfaces (UI); software designed using service-oriented architecture (SOA), APIs and microservices; as well as ETL and BI Reporting applications.

More and more, Functional Testing is being automated to overcome today’s impending software challenges (i.e. requirements capturing, selecting the right tools, honing the skillsets of QA analysts, and proper enhancement of regression suite and maintenance).

When establishing Functional Test automation practices, QA managers should consider the following areas:

  • Holistic feasibility study to analyze automation
  • Test Automation Frameworks (Keyword, Data, and Hybrid) which can be reused for different Web and mobile applications (Native, Hybrid, and Web)
  • Reduction in Testware development time and effective maintenance
  • Testing with Cloud-based tools to enhance test efficiency and reducing Testware development time
  • Cloud-based testing on a variety of browsers for Web and devices for Mobile apps, with a variation in operating systems providing efficient coverage of real-usage scenarios
  • Responsive UI layout testing on a wide range of browsers and devices
  • Acceptance Test Automation using behavior-driven development tools
  • The exploitation of Open Source tools/APIs to generate cost-effectiveness
  • Reduction in time to market and effective ROI
  • Adherence to best practices and best QA tools available

Leading open-source and commercial tools for Functional Testing include the following.

Web, Desktop and API Automation

Commercial Tools: TestComplete, UiPath, TOSCA
Open Source Tools: Katalon Studio

Mobile Automation

Commercial Tool: Perfecto
Open Source Tool: Appium

Non-Functional Testing

Non-Functional Testing applies to areas outside the functionality of the software but are essential for the software’s performance. As such, Non-Functional Testing typically covers areas like performance testing, load testing and vulnerability (or security) testing.

Market trends in testing are quickly moving toward non-functional testing, as organizations become more aligned towards getting their applications to meet specific performance/security criteria before deploying into the “real” world. The best solutions aim at exploiting open source tools to build robust and distributed performance test suites, which simulate realistic user loads helping to discover bottlenecks before the application goes live.

When establishing Non-Functional Test practices, QA managers should consider the following areas:

  • Creation of Web/mobile app performance tests after analyzing usage patterns
  • Optimization of performance tests using API and scripting of Open Source tools
  • Leveraging Cloud-testing tools to simulate higher loads and realistic geographic loads from different geographies
  • Simulation of loads from various browsers for Web applications
  • Mobile performance testing on various networks Edge, 3G, 4G, LTE, etc.
  • Distributed load testing to simulate higher and realistic user loads
  • Generation of easily comprehensive load test reports, which act as a critical input to analyzing application performance
  • Analysis of application performance per page and server request/response analysis before it is productionized
  • Considering all the parameters for performance testing for Web applications (i.e. server, pages, and HTTP request/responses), hence providing a thorough insight into the performance of the application
  • Generating test reports which are easily readable by key stakeholders
  • Surveillance of Web applications for present vulnerabilities
  • Penetration of vulnerabilities discovered
  • Knowledge of prominent APIs/tools to develop strong test suites
  • Development of custom Test Suite for Security Testing
  • Coverage for the discovery of standard vulnerabilities enlisted by OWASP

Leading open-source and commercial tools for Non-Functional Testing include the following.

Performance Test Automation

Commercial Tool: Load Runner, NeoLoad
Open Source Tools: Apache Jmeter

Security/Penetration Testing

Commercial Tool: Burpsuite
Open Source Tool: Kali Linux

The Future of Testing

This article provides a brief introduction to the world of Functional and Non-Functional Testing. There is a wide array of commercial and open-source tools in the market to address specific kinds of testing requirements or to help build out an enterprise test automation framework to fit with Agile and DevOps testing strategies.

Whether just starting the process to implement testing practices or advancing your capability to a fully automated testing framework, Functional and Non-Functional Testing are both essential to delivering the best quality software in today’s competitive environment. Keeping ahead of changing industry trends, Bitwise is well versed in providing test automation tools, technology, and capabilities to enable the perfect testing strategy for your company’s needs. See our Performance and Mobile Testing page to explore further.

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Planning and Building a Self-Service Platform

When planning a Self-Service BI solution, organizations need to clearly define their expectations from the platform. Setup of the platform requires close collaboration between IT and Business teams. Once the platform is built, the business users take over and accomplish the majority of their analysis, discovery and reporting using the analytical toolset integrated into the platform without having to depend on their IT teams.

Building a Self-Service BI Platform

BI Strategy

Self-Service BI is a vision of BI enablement, therefore, the journey should start with defining the BI requirements aligned with the business goals and objectives of your organization.

Identify Users and Their Needs

One size does not fit all when it comes to defining self-service, so it is imperative to identify the variety of users and their specific requirements. The user base can be broadly categorized as ‘Report Consumers,’ ‘Functional Users’ and ‘Power Users.’

The responsibilities of the users may vary based on organizational requirements and individual user capability:

  • Report Consumers consume the batch or canned reports created by BI developers.
  • Functional Users use the parameterized report template or interactive dashboards for their specific analysis and reporting requirements.
  • Power Users create and publish reports for internal and external consumers, trend analysis, data discovery and advanced analytics. They are the business domain experts and collaborate with their IT teams to enhance and maintain the self-service platform.

Data Provisioning – Building the Data Lake

There are several key components required to build the data lake. These components include:

  • Identify data sources in line with the business requirement.
  • Define the data model and storage layers (primarily raw, processed, sandbox and presentation).
  • Define the extract, transform and load (ETL) strategy for each layer.
  • Ensure data integrity via ETL checkpoints, business-driven quality checks and database constraints.

Controlled Environment

Since business users will be accessing data in a more direct way than in traditional BI, access controls need to be established based on user roles to ensure a secure environment. Access controls include:

  • Business users need to have Read Only access to Raw, Processed and Presentation layer
  • Read/Write access to the sandbox layer
  • Sandbox setup (categorization by Business vertical, Demography, Users)
  • Role-based access to sandbox and data (residing in the Data Lake)
  • The sandbox layer supports data manipulation and discovery. Power users are able to copy data from any of the read-only layers based on defined access into their designated sandbox environment.

Selecting the Self-Service Toolset

The organizational goal, BI strategy and business user requirements drive the selection of the toolset. The following parameters can help the tool evaluation aligned with the business requirement:

  • Support for Data preparation
  • Prompts for forming Query
  • Support for Real-time analytics
  • Support for Predictive Analytics
  • Support for Mobile versions
  • Ability to build rich intuitive Dashboards
  • Support for Scheduling and Distribution
  • Social Media Analytics

Defining Success Criteria for Self-Service BI

Collaboration between the IT and Business teams is the key to building a robust and sustainable Self-Service BI platform. The following factors will influence the ROI and success of the self-service platform:

Alignment and Adaptability

IT teams should be responsible for maintaining, aligning, and adapting the platform to variations in usage or querying patterns in collaboration with the business users.

Scalable Platform

There should be a mechanism for continuous assessment, evaluation, and adoption of newer analytical tools to facilitate advanced analytics (real-time, predictive). The framework should support easy integration and adoption of newer tools as needed.

Minimal Handoffs between IT and Business Teams

Business users should be able to create their reports and run a majority of their analysis independently without having a dependency on their IT teams. This ensures that the experts in a business domain have the capability of running their own analysis and creating/generating their own reports. IT teams would be primarily be involved in facilitating, maintaining, and enhancing the self-service platform.

Feature Rich Toolset Support

The selection of the right toolset tuned to the business user requirement is key to enhancing the self-service experience. The ability to analyze multi-dimensional data and create rich interactive and intuitive dashboards for executive consumption empowers the Power Users to be creative and innovative.

Extensibility

A provision for building and maintaining ad hoc custom utilities will enhance the capability of the platform. In addition to building reports, the business users should have access to either use a pre-built utility or create a custom process to pull data (external or from the data lake) into their sandbox for analysis. This action would be controlled via the data access roles and associated permissions.

Self-Service is No Longer a Luxury but a Business Necessity

More and more organizations are realizing the benefits and ROI associated with enabling a Self-Service BI platform, thereby empowering the business users (domain experts) to analyze, query, design, and share their own reports. With clearly defined roles between IT and Business, the benefits are quite evident and visible in the form of improved time to production, overall cost of ownership and goal driven development aligned to the business strategy.

Self-Service requirements will change with time (changing user base and business requirements). The key to sustaining an effective self-service capability is continuous assessment, collaboration (IT and Business) and adoption of new technology tools and trends.

Whether your business needs a traditional BI or Self-Service solution, check out our blog post on 5 Keys to Nailing a BI Implementation for ensuring that business users can access the information they need to support growth.

Let’s discuss how we can empower your business users through self-service BI: Contact us

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