Main aim of any application or software testing is to build a high quality product. Functional testing and unit testing are the foundation of the testing process. Both software testing types have their own importance in software development. Functional testing is performed by the tester during system testing whereas unit testing is performed by the developer during the development cycle. Utility of functional testing is understood by users, developers and QA alike. Here we will understand the various aspects of unit testing vs functional testing. Before digging to the comparison, let us see what is unit testing and what is functional testing.

What Is Unit Testing?
Unit testing is a popular testing that helps to eliminate the risk of having bugs in codes. And so it is adopted by many organizations. In this type of testing all individual units or components are tested. Main purpose is to validate each unit of software code and check whether they are performing as expected or not. It isolates the code section, verifies correctness of code, test each function and procedure, finds early bugs and fixes in the development cycle to save costs, helps developers to understand the code base and enable them to make changes quickly, and helps for code reuse.

What Is Functional Testing?
This software testing process validates software systems against functional requirements. Main goal of functional testing is to test functionality of software application by providing input, output verification according to the functional requirements. It finds defects that programmer may have ignored while developing software, provides information about the level of quality, prevents defects, and ensures that the result meets the business and user’s requirements.

You can also know the difference between Alpha, Beta and Gamma Testing at- Alpha, Beta and Gamma Testing- What is the difference?

Unit Testing Vs Functional Testing-
1. Purpose-
Unit Testing-
Individual units of code are tested separately with unit testing. Main purpose of unit testing is to separate the smallest testable parts of API and verify if it functions properly in isolation. This testing verifies the different behavioral aspects of system under testing, whereas mainly it verifies whether the system under testing produces the correct results or not. From the developer’s point of view, the goal of unit testing is to create strong codebase with less cost. Also the important purpose of unit testing is to provide documentation for high-level testing like integration testing and functional testing.

Functional Testing-
Main goal of functional testing is to check the functionalities of a system. In this type of testing, a tester is not worried about the core code, rather they have to verify the output based on the user requirements with expected output. Functional tests check the whole software, its software, and networking infrastructure – from the front end to the back end database systems. It is form of integration testing which ensures that all components are working together as needed. Functional testing don’t enlighten you about the errors or its location. It just notifies you that something is broken, it can be the browser, test or race condition. As it follows end-to-end testing, there is no way to tell.

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Solace Infotech