What Is Smoke Testing In Software QA Testing?

This automated test runs quickly, enabling self-scoring of the test. Shanika Wickramasinghe is a software engineer by profession and a graduate in Information Technology. She is an expert in Software Automation Testing and Web Development. Shanika considers writing the best medium https://globalcloudteam.com/ to learn and share her knowledge. She is passionate about everything she does, loves to travel, and enjoys nature whenever she takes a break from her busy work schedule. Test reports are necessary to provide relevant parties with an overview of the quality of a product or service.

A smoke test consists of functional or unit tests of critical software functionality. Smoke testing is an essential part of software testing and can help to ensure that the application is functioning correctly before moving on to more detailed testing. This type of testing checks the performance and stability of the application.

What is Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC)?

Smoke testing can be done by a person who has internal code knowledge such as a developer. In that case, the developer can be categorized as a white box tester. Also, smoke testing can be done by a person who doesn’t have internal code knowledge such as Quality Assurance Engineer. Usually, smoke testing falls under black box testing but there can be situations where it can become white box too. Hybrid typically refers to a combination of manual and automated testing techniques. Testsigma is used for real-time mobile application testing using its easy-to-use and intuitive interface.

• It creates a new Playwright browserContext, which is an incognito browser session.
• Smoke tests can highlight the big issues, while subsequent tests highlight the more minor and elusive problems later.
• The software build then moves on to more rigorous tests, such as unit and integration tests.
• Microsoft claims that after code reviews, “smoke testing is the most cost-effective method for identifying and fixing defects in software”.
• By design, smoke tests do not cover every permutation and edge case.
• They instead check that your application isn’t so broken that additional testing would be a waste of time.

Originally coined when smoke was introduced to check for leaks in newly manufactured containers and pipes, the term also refers to testing a software application for the first time. Usually smoke testing is performed with positive scenarios and with valid data. Soak testing is a type of performance and load test that evaluates how a software application handles a growing number of users for an extended period of time. Sometimes even after Smoke testing the whole application, critical issues arise in integration and system testing.

Types of smoke testing

Smoke tests provide additional peace of mind that your application won’t break when you release that awesome new feature. A device was turned on, and would fail the smoke test if it caught on fire. Smoke testing is sometimes called “build verification testing”. Any software project requires time and money, and smoke testing is fully scripted, so special manpower is needed.

In modern software development, continuous delivery is a must. However, it is important to have a testing infrastructure set up to ensure your existing and main functionality retains normal operations despite news changes introduced. Ideally, smoke testing should be one step within a CI pipeline. Moreover, we highly recommend leveraging functional tests for some of the most critical aspects of your software in a test suite for smoke testing. After performing the smoke testing, the tester should also be able to approve or reject the deployed build.

Reduce dev cycle time

Then, this team will uncover any faults in the application functionality with the introduction of new code. The analogy was later applied to software testing, where a smoke test is used to check a software build for basic functionality and identify any major issues that need to be addressed. Smoke tests are non-exhaustive as they are designed to quickly determine whether a product is stable enough to be tested further. It does not cover every feature of the smoke testing software. It is designed to be a high-level test of the most important functionalities.

After a code refactoring or major change in the code base, smoke testing can be used to ensure that the code is still functioning as expected. QA teams will be more productive and have higher job satisfaction when they can have more confidence about higher-viability builds that successfully pass through the smoke test suite. Smoke Testing is done whenever the new functionalities of the software are developed and integrated with an existing build that is deployed in a QA/staging environment.

Curated for all your Testing Needs

A software smoke test after a branch merge would involve running a set of tests to ensure that the merge did not introduce any new bugs or regressions into the codebase. This could include checking that the code compiles correctly, that the unit tests pass, and that the application still functions as expected. With the help of smoke testing, most of the defects are identified at the initial stages of software development life cycle. According to testing needs, you may have to carry out both sanity and smoke tests in the software build. In such scenarios, the smoke test is first performed, followed by the sanity test.

The process of automation typically involves yet another software engineering project. The most popular tools for building new testing automation focus on browser automation. The most popular browser automation framework today is Selenium, which is an open-source project that enables developers to automate browsers. This is important because you have to emulate user behavior to properly test modern web applications today. A proper automation framework will enable teams to both emulate user behavior and get visibility into all of these non-visible phenomena.

Send alert when tests fail

To elaborate on the previous point on automation, one can completely automate the smoke testing procedure. This list’s subsequent item will what is smoke test provide more context for that idea. Automation tools are readily available, and multiple tool suppliers make various product promises.

There is a functionality to update the password on the user profile page. The sanity check would need to validate both the login page and the user profile page to ensure that the checks are working successfully. Sanity tests are typically performed on software build where immediate production deployment is needed – like for a critical bug fix.

Process to conduct Smoke Testing

The execution of critical functionality testing should follow the distribution of the build to QA to uncover serious system problems. If testing is successful, functional testing continues further. If the test fails, the build is discarded and sent back to the production team for modification. In this, the development team sends the application to the Test Lead. Then the test lead will instruct the testing team to do smoke testing and send the reports after performing the smoke testing. Once the testing team is done with smoke testing, they will send the smoke testing report to the test lead.