Introduction to Functional Web Testing With Twill & Selenium

Explain our definition of functional testing.

• What is it?
• Who does it?
• Why?

Functional tests are tests that ensure the functionality of a piece of software.

Sounds like a cop-out, right? Here's what functional testing is not:

• unit testing: unit tests are generally written by the software engineers to test discrete pieces of code.
• integration testing: integration tests make sure the pieces of code don't break when they're run together as part of an application. There does tend to be some overlap between integration and functional testing.
• acceptance testing: acceptance tests are usually manual, and are performed by the people who've requested a specific application feature.

Okay, great, but what is it? Functional testing is one of those things where, if you ask four people for definitions, you'll get five answers. But for the purposes of this tutorial, functional web tests are automated black-box-esque tests that exercise the application as a whole by simulating user behavior.

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