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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