What is the basic difference between Structural and Functional Testing?

Different people use different Software terminologies as per their convenience  and here are two more which are used in Software Industry, specifically among Quality Prfessionals.

Structural testing is about comparing software behavior against the apparent intention of the source code wirtten to execute it. Many testers call it White-Box Testing or Glass-Box Testing :) Structural testing is also called path testing since you choose test cases that cause paths to be taken through the structure of the program.


Other the other side, functional testing is about comparing workflows behavior in the application against user requirements specification. This is also called as Black-Box Testing.

Structural testing verifies how the program works by considering possible pitfalls in the structure and logic. In Functional testing, nobody is bothered about the internals. It simply focuses on the end results and way they are delivered to users.