Understanding Non-functional System Testing | What Is Non-functional System Testing ?

Introduction:

Non-functional system testing is one kind of testing software where tests are made of all the non-functional aspects related to the software system, like performance, reliability, scalability, security, and usability. Different from functionality testing that focuses on the test of each function and feature within software, non-functional testing tests how the software performs in a variety of conditions and stress levels.

Non-functional system testing is also referred to as non-functional testing and it involves the testing of attributes of a systems which may not directly be related to the behavior of the system relative to the users. Non-functional testing on the other hand assesses attributes like speed, stability, ease of use, flexibility, safety, and interoperability of the system.

Key aspects:

Here are some key aspects of non-functional system testing:

Performance Testing: This kind of testing helps the testing team and the developers to evaluate how well the system can work at its optimum, maximum or even beyond maximum capacity or for how long it can sustain those conditions with load testing, stress testing, and endurance testing respectively. Non-functional testing such as performance testing helps to check that the system achieves relevant performance standards such as response time, number of transactions processed as well as usage of system resources.
Reliability Testing: By doing reliability testing, the system is basically tested on how well it would respond to changes in time and other associated factors. Some of the common tests are stability, fault-tolerance, and a failure-recovery test to guarantee minimum IT failure and crash prevalence.
Usability Testing: Usability testing allows for the determination of several features of the system that would be beneficial to the users. It is used to address things like how easily one can find what they are looking for on the website, the arrangement and organization of the buttons on the site and the likes.
Scalability Testing: Load testing is the process that estimates the actual load of data, transactions or concurrent users on the system within the defined time period. It also helps to know that the system can be easily accommodated if application loads increase or decrease in the future.
Security Testing: Security testing verifies the resilience and integrity of a system to safeguard data, identify the leakage and keep it confidential, determine user verification, and prevent hacking, viruses, and intrusion.
Compatibility Testing: Compatibility testing checks on how well the system will operate under various environments, operating systems, equipment's, and setting. It ensures compatibility with various operating system platforms and web browsers, database systems, and hardware configurations.
Maintainability Testing: Maintainability testing basically looks at how easy it is to maintain and update the system and to make changes to it as needed. It defines elements like code readability, modularity, and the ease in correcting the defects or enhancement of some features.

Overview:

Here's a brief overview of non-functional system testing:

Performance Testing: This is the aspect of testing the system with an aim to check if it is responding well in different test conditions, with normal usage, peak load conditions, and stress conditions. It tests response time, throughput, and resource utilization.
Reliability Testing: This deals with the consistency and reliability of the system while functioning. It is aimed at testing the failures, errors, and system crashes under a variety of conditions.
Scalability Testing: Scalability testing checks if the system can rise up to the increasing load and user demands without the system performance being affected or becoming unstable. It assures that the system can either scale up or scale down efficiently based on the changes in requirements.
Security Testing: This refers to the system's defense mechanisms to prevent inappropriate access, data breaches, and security flaws. It is to test for authentication, authorization, encryption, and data integrity.
Usability Testing: This is the evaluation of the user interface and navigation along with the overall user experience. It assesses ease of use, accessibility, and user satisfaction.
Compatibility Testing: Testing is done to check if the system behaves properly with various operating systems, browsers, devices, and configurations of software. It ensures that the system functions correctly under different environments.
Maintainability Testing: Evaluate if the system is easy to maintain or modify. It assesses how good the documentation is and how easy it is for the user to debug the system.
Load Testing: Verify if the system has managed to remain stable and normal when dealing with normal user loads and those experienced at peak hours so as to ensure that the performance should not degrade under such situations.
Stress Testing: This is used to test the system to its limits in order to identify the breaking point and identify potential failures. It helps in the assessment of the system's robustness and is able to perform well under extreme conditions.
Resilience Testing: Determine if the system can recover from the failure and disruptions, like hardware failure, network downtime, and software failures. It assesses how much time the system takes to come back to normalcy after being disrupted.

Example:

E-commerce Website

Suppose, a team includes the process of designing an e-commerce website. Besides the functional, which includes checking whether the site works fine while browsing products, using buttons for adding them to a cart or making purchases, several non-functional testing aspects must be checked by the team to ensure the user will not face the problems.

Performance Testing:

Scenario: For instance, load testing is employed to determine the number of users and their interactions by actively engaging the website at the busiest time (e. g. Black Friday promotions).
Objective: Eventually, make sure that the average response times of the website stay within acceptable time constraints, and that the system can handle peak requests within effective time constraints.

Reliability Testing:

Scenario: As part of utilization testing, the team carries out the workflow exercise over 24 hours to measure the website’s performance under constant load.
Objective: Ensure that the website is working fine and does not exhibit signs of memory leaks or has a slow response, should it have been working fine initially, and then slows down with time.

Usability Testing:

Scenario: Usability testing entails the participation of real life users, in their ability to move around the website, search for products, place them in the cart and purchase the products.
Objective: I would narrow down your search, which is to look for any areas of confusion such as, user interface and navigation, unclear descriptions of a product, or unresponsive and complicated check-out methods that would irritate the user.

Security Testing:

Scenario: Security testing focuses on pen testing, which is a controlled attack to check for security vulnerabilities and scanner test to detect other possible weaknesses.
Objective: The security aspect that should not be overlooked is the security of customer information, the integrity of the transactions that transpire on the site, and the general protection of the site against common hacker attacks like SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS).

Compatibility Testing:

Scenario: The initial quality assurance check involves checking the website on different browsers, operating system and devices including chrome, firefox, safari, Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, android, on desktop, tablet and mobile.
Objective: Ensure that there are no issues with the website functionality and that the website is properly responsive, that is, it will look and work the same no matter the device or browsers the user chooses.

Scalability Testing:

Scenario: This kind of test focuses on adding products, users and number of transactions, in order to determine how well the web site performs for scaling.
Objective: Ascertaining if the particular Web site is capable of accommodating the growth of traffic, transaction, and data size without decreasing in speed or having operational drawbacks.

Maintainability Testing:

Scenario: It assesses the organization's code quality to enhance legibility, scalability, and other factors for improvements or corrections.
Objective: Make sure that the organization and the documentation of the . web site’s code is solid and clean to make future updates and troubleshooting easy.

Advantages of non-functional system testing:

here are some advantages of non-functional system testing:

Improved System Reliability: Non-functional testing, particularly performed during early stages of the development, increases the reliability of the software system by providing proof to vital aspects such as performance, scalability and reliability. This is beneficial in meeting the user’s needs by providing a consistent product.
Enhanced User Experience: Usability testing shows that the developed software has the highest characteristics, which contribute to a positive experience of using the existing application. It can lead to enhanced user satisfaction and customer loyalty to a particular website or blog.
Early Detection of Performance Issues: They also discover more on possible areas of taps based on response time, throughput and utility. Ideally implemented early, it can enable teams to enhance performance in a pre-deployment setting, hence reducing performance associated failure in the actual environment.
Increased Security: Security testing provides the ability to find other forms of weaknesses including authentication flaws, authorization issues, and data leakage. Alleviating them from the onset makes that system more immune to cyber threats.
Scalability Assurance: Load testing is the process of validating that the software can perform under growing workloads and in various forms of usage. This is particularly important for systems that have to be expected to expand over the years, or have a likelihood of being flooded with traffic that might bring them down.
Cost-Effectiveness: Testing conditions that relate to non-functional requirements should be optimized early and are cheaper to implement than during the manufacturing phase or after a product is released to the market. This minimizes the chances of incurring lots of expenses to redo something that was done wrongly and brings improvement to the general performance of the project.
Compliance and Standards: Non functional testing is quite important in ensuring that the software developed meets certain requirements of the industry, laws and standard practices in the market. This is more so to organizations in industries like the health sector, finance, and the government since compliance is compulsory.

Here's the reference video for you to watch and better understand the topic:

Non-functional Testing:

System Testing:

Summary:

In other words, non-functional testing helps ensure that the software meets quality and provides good performance to the users. When thorough tests are conducted on the non-functional aspects of the system, it can be early in development to identify and proactively address any possible issues, resulting in a more reliable and robust software solution.

Non-functional testing is a crucial part of the software development life process because it covers the aspects of the software that address quality characteristics that are very important to the end users and criticality of the system. Since non-functional testing involves the assessment of qualities such as performance, security, usability, and compatibility, among others, organized enterprises can adequately check risks that are inherent in these components of software development and hence provide a quality and reliable system solution to end users.