Smoke testing, What? When and Why?

What is smoke testing? When and why to execute. Smoke testing is a type of testing, which you might come across the majority of your projects.

Also defined as “Build Verification Testing“.  Verify whether major functionalities are working fine and continue with full fledged testing. Small health checking of application with limited testing activity. Carried out with positive test cases.  It covers all the basic and important functionalities of an application.

When to execute Smoke Testing?

• Developers when they are ready to deliver code for testing team.
• Testers when a new build is deployed to test environment.
• Business users when code delivered to UAT.

Why to perform Smoke Testing?

• To ensure integrity of application is as expected and there are no breaks.
• Verify critical or major functionalities are working fine.
• To find major bugs related to critical functionalities and integration of application.
• Ensure changes to the application (if the build is the future release with bug fixes or improvements) not affecting existing functionalities.

Example:

You are working on an e-commerce project where you received a new build. Application got 4 different modules, Login, Catalog and payment service and email confirmation. The smoke test case will be as below.

• Able to Login
• Select Product
• Navigate to payment service
• Email confirmation received
• User Registration

First, you verify whether the user can login to the application. Then user can select a product and navigate to payment services. Once you submit payment you receive a email confirmation. Additionally, you can verify user able to register on the site.

Yes, Smoke testing will have defined test cases, so bugs raised can be linked to test cases.

Disadvantages:

• Will not cover detailed testing of applications.
• It’s a non-exhaustive testing with a small number of test cases due to which we not are able to find the other critical issues.
• There will be Negative scenarios and invalid data.

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