Functionality Testing

Making sure your website works correctly

The quality of your website is vital to ensure that visitors browsing the site are able to find the information they are looking for and convert to become prospects or customers.

Our approach to functionality testing is to test every element of your website to make sure it works correctly, we uncover issues that prevent a website visitor from completing a user journey, such as making a purchase.

Functionality testing finds problems that often go unnoticed, as nobody realises that a particular feature doesn’t actually work correctly. Fixing these problems improves the conversion rate and the quality of your website overall.

Approach to functionality testing

Our approach to functionality testing, or functional testing, varies depending on the project and the requirements of our client.

For some projects we will carry out a test planning phase before testing, to review the functional specification or project documentation, prepare test scripts and make sure that the testing we carry out will fully test the website or application. When we execute the test scripts, results are recorded in our test management software and a test report is produced once testing is completed and made available in Testing Manager.

For many other projects, there isn’t a requirement to have a test planning phase, such as for a website audit. For these projects we carry out a form of testing known as exploratory testing, which is very successful in finding many issues in an efficient manner.

For complex web applications or where the requirement is to verify the website works as per a project specification, we would recommend carrying out a test planning phase before functionality testing is conducted.

Exploratory testing can be used for many projects where time, budget or another requirement doesn’t allow for a test planning phase. We have found hundreds of bugs for single web projects using this approach so test planning is not always required.

Areas of functionality we typically test

Our functionality testing typically covers the following areas, however, this is not the limit of what we test.

  1. Menus, breadcrumbs and other navigational aids.
  2. Positioning and styling of elements.
  3. Testing page layouts and that content is displayed correctly.
  4. Testing the functionality of forms, different field types, validation messages and that forms submit correctly.
  5. Site search facility, search results and relevance of results.
  6. Testing the shopping basket and full checkout process.
  7. Payment processing of each card type.
  8. Login and registration systems including forgotten password and my account.
  9. Social network integration and content sharing functions.
  10. Testing all the required functions of the content management system including updating content, amending the site’s appearance and other site settings.
  11. Testing integrations with CRM, Email marketing, Analytics, Helpdesk and other systems.

The above areas are not the limit of what we test, each project is different and has individual functionality.

Functionality testing process

The functionality testing service follows our standard testing process.

  1. We review the specification, wireframes and designs.
  2. We create a test plan listing all the functionality and elements to be tested.
  3. We carry out the testing and record any issues found in our bug tracking software.
  4. All issues recorded include a description, URL, screenshot and priority.
  5. We provide a report detailing what has been tested and a breakdown of the issues found.
  6. Access to everything including the report and the issues found is through our client area.
  7. We can retest all the bugs fixed plus carry out a full regression test to make sure nothing has been broken.

View Our Services

Regular functionality testing for ecommerce sites
Per project functionality testing for site launches

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