Functional Testing has always been an activity done by Test Engineers using Functional Testing tools like QTP from HP/Mercury, SilkTest from Borland/Segue, Functional Tester from IBM/Rational, … But time is changing – so is Functional Testing – and the things you can do with it. In this article I talk about The Past – Functional Testing done by Testers The Present – More and More Functional Testing done by Developers with the help of Frameworks The Future - Extend Functional Testing with Transactional Tracing to improve Root Cause Analysis and Automate Architecture Validation Read more at

Hi Andreas: I'd like to read your article. When I clicked on the link I get a 404 Not Found error. -Frank

I also would like to read more but same result 404

There is a trailing quote character at the end of the URL in the link.

Sorry for the broken link - I cannot edit the original message - but here is the corrected link http://blog.dynatrace.com/2009/06/24/do-more-with-functional-testing-take-the-next-evolutionary-step/

Sorry, Andy, you had some slightly malformed html in your original post, and I didn't actually click through. It is fixed now.

Hello, I agree that more and more functional testing can be/is being automated, but there are a lot of things that are very difficult to automate and will always require manual testing by actual testers. Regards, Dennis Tools for Software Teams Java Debugging, Test Management Software

Thats correct - 100% automation is hard to achieve. But - with advancing testing frameworks/tools and by architecting applications for testing you can achieve a higher level of testability. The key argument of my post however is that you can do much more than just verifying the functionality of the software you are testing. Performance Regression and especially Architecture Validation are two aspects that you can get almost "for free" with your existing functional tests Cheers

"More and more functional testing done by the developer". Interesting statement (on two levels).

Firstly I've been in testing 20 years and I've seen little if any shift towards developers wanting to take on functional testing. Yes agree that developers have been taking on more automation as part of the agile movement but that's in alignment with test teams taking on more functional testing too. I've yet to really see any development team really embrace functional testing to the extent where the QA team are side lined.

Secondly, is it right that developers take on more testing? The key purpose of having a separate QA team is impartiality. If developers take on more then we're back to that concept of testing our own work with all the risks that entails.

To be quite blunt I'd say leave functional testing and test management predominantly  to the QA team.