TestersBlog

Function Testing

Today I was reading James Bach PDF Document about Heuristics and different types of testing. What does function testing mean? It means that to check whether if the product functions as it should be supposed to according to the requirement. But I found a amazing statement which said “The product should also be tested for the functions which it is not supposed to perform”. I will explain it with an example.
Example: If there is a registration page and it has fields like First Name & Last Name. I think names doesn’t have any numerics. So the function of First Name & Last Name should be to allow only alphabets (No numerics, No special characters). But it seems that most of the developers bother only about “What function should be added”. The developers don’t think “What function the product shouldn’t perform”. The testers also write few test cases. In this example: Testers write “First Name & Last Name should take alphabets as input”. They don’t bother to check if it accepts numerics or not. Most of the organizations today don’t understand what is “Function Testing”.

GMail Sign up Page accepts numeric as First Name & Last Name. But Yahoo doesn’t take numerics as input. No one has told Google about it? Google has to become serious about usability heuristics.

Thanks to James Bach for a nice document explaining about Function Testing.