The Role of Non-Functional Testing

What is Non Functional Testing?

Non-functional testing (NFT) refers to the evaluation of a system’s characteristics that aren’t related to specific behaviours or functions.

NFT’s are essential as its meticulous evaluations ensures that the system not only functions correctly but also meets the requirements concerning performance, security, usability, and other critical aspects that contribute to overall user satisfaction and system reliability.

NFT’s are a strategic approach that underlines the quality and resilience of a system. Incorporating these evaluations throughout the development life cycle not only fortifies the system but also significantly reduces the risks associated with potential failures and setbacks.

Different types of Non Functional testing

• Performance Testing: Performance testing scrutinizes a system’s response under diverse conditions. Load testing, stress testing, and scalability assessments explore its resilience under heavy traffic, ensuring it maintains efficiency and stability even during peak usage.
• Security Testing: In an age of rampant cyber threats, security testing stands as a sentinel, fortifying systems against vulnerabilities, safeguarding sensitive data, and preserving user trust. Penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, and encryption audits are pivotal facets of this evaluation.
• Usability Testing: Usability testing prioritizes the end user, examining the system’s intuitiveness, ease of navigation, and overall user experience. This ensures that functionality is complemented by a seamless interface, enhancing user adoption and satisfaction.
• Reliability Testing: Reliability testing puts systems through rigorous scenarios, testing their consistency and stability over extended periods. It guarantees that the system can deliver consistent performance, ensuring reliability in real-world applications.
• Compatibility Testing: Compatibility testing validates a system’s adaptability across varied environments, devices, browsers, or operating systems. It ensures a seamless experience regardless of the user’s chosen platform.
• Scalability Testing: Scalability testing examines a system’s ability to expand seamlessly with increasing demands. It ensures the system can accommodate growth without compromising performance or user experience.
• Maintainability Testing: Maintainability testing assesses the system’s ease of maintenance, upgrades, and support. It ensures that future modifications or enhancements can be integrated seamlessly without disrupting functionality.

The changing nature of NFT’S

The landscape of Non-Functional Testing (NFT) has evolved significantly. With modern solutions being held in the cloud this shift has led to a decrease in traditional testing practices across network backbones and servers. Software vendors like Microsoft now bear responsibility for ensuring a certain level of hardware performance to be met from their hosting platforms.

However, there is still a need to ensure that the non-functional requirements and processes are meeting an expected level of performance. We encourage that clients should take a pragmatic approach and only identify non-functional testing where specific processing times, loads, volumes etc are an essential part of business acceptance.

At Hitachi Solutions, we offer comprehensive non-functional testing solutions leveraging tools like JMeter as a foundational framework. Our approach involves proactive collaboration with clients to meticulously define precise non-functional requirements. This ensures that the solution aligns seamlessly with the performance standards outlined by our clients

Given the expansive scope of Non-Functional Testing (NFT) and its diverse testing types, we highly recommend connecting with our experts at Hitachi Solutions. Through collaborative workshops tailored to your needs, we delve into a comprehensive assessment of your specific non-functional requirements. Therefore, this approach allows us to reach precise estimates for conducting various NFT assessments, including Performance, Load, and more, tailored specifically to your system’s demands

For more information on how you can implement Non Function testing into your systems, speak to one of our experts here.