Functional testing is a way to ensure that the applications work as expected by the user. Functional tests are developed so as to capture the user requirements, provide both users and developer’s a confidence that the business processes will meet those requirements and enable QA teams to verify that the software is ready for release. Functional tests are written from the end user’s and business-process perspective.

The pressure on today’s IT organizations is increasing everyday. Management is expecting IT to deliver new capabilities, unlock new business opportunities and deliver competitive advantages through software. This means the addition of many more business application development projects with tighter deadlines—but not always with more budget or incremental resources.

At the same time, management is becoming increasingly aware of the critical links between software and revenue. Web services, online transaction processing (OLTP) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications are mission-critical and are directly tied to the company’s ability to generate revenue.

Today’s enterprises rely on very complex computing infrastructures. A typical organization may depend on multiple applications that were built to work on different operating systems, utilize several different front-end clients, involve numerous business processes, and interact with many separate data sets. Testing all possible permutations of these components creates a highly complex testing situation with hundreds or thousands of testing scenarios.

If software fails, the loss is really high like reduction is sales, unproductive employees, unhappy customers and demoralized development and QA team. The defects are more expensive if found late in the development cycle. A defect identified in a production environment can be 100 times more expensive to fix than the same defect identified earlier in the design phase. Automation is the key to improving the speed, accuracy, and flexibility of the software testing process, enabling companies to find and fix more defects at an early stage.