Smoke Testing

SMOKE  TESTING or SANITY TESTING or DRY RUN or SKIM TESTING or BUILD VERIFICATION TESTING or CONFIDENCE TESTING.

Testing the basic or critical features of an application before doing thorough testing or rigorous testing is called as smoke testing.

It is also called Build Verification Testing – because we check whether the build is broken or not.

Whenever a new build comes in, we always start with smoke testing, because for every new build – there might be some changes which might have broken a major feature ( fixing the bug or adding a new feature could have affected a major portion of the original software).

In smoke testing, we do only positive testing – i.e, we enter only valid data and not invalid data.

Important Points to Remember

·         When we are doing smoke testing, we do only positive testing (only valid data is entered)

·         Here, we test only basic or critical features

·         Here, we take basic features and test for important scenarios

·         Whenever the build comes to the customer, before the customer / client does Acceptance Testing, he also does Smoke Testing before doing Acceptance Testing

·         When the product is installed in production, we do quick smoke testing to ensure product is installed properly.

Why we do Smoke testing ?

·         Just to ensure that product is testable

·         Do smoke testing in the beginning – catch bugs in basic features – send it to development team so that development team will have sufficient time to fix it.

Just to ensure that product is installed properly.

In early stages of product development, doing smoke testing fetches more number of bugs. But, in later stages of product development, if you do smoke testing – the number of bugs that you are going to catch in smoke testing will be very less. Thus, gradually the effort spent on smoke testing is less.

Note :- only for information purpose (NOT FOR STUDYING)

Smoke testing is classified into two types,

·         Formal Smoke Testing – the development team sends the s/w to the test lead. The test lead then instructs the testing team to do smoke testing and send report after smoke testing. Once, the testing team is done with smoke testing, they send the smoke testing report to the Test lead.

·         Informal Smoke Testing – here, the test lead says the product is ready and to start testing. He does not specify to do smoke testing. But, still the testing team start testing the product by doing smoke testing. 

This testing can be done both manually and also with the help of automation tools. But the best and preferred way is to use automation tools to save time.


https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/smoke-testing-and-sanity-testing-difference/

Advantages And Disadvantages of automating smoke test cases

Let us first take a look at the advantages as it has a lot to offer when compared to its few disadvantages.

Advantages:

• Easy to perform.
• Reduces the risk.
• Defects are identified at a very early stage.
• Saves efforts, time and money.
• Runs quickly if automated.
• Least integration risks and issues.
• Improves the overall quality of the system.

Disadvantages:

• This testing is not equal to or a substitute for complete functional testing.
• Even after the smoke test passes, you may find showstopper bugs.
• This type of testing is best suitable if you can automate else a lot of time is spent on manually executing the test cases especially in large-scale projects having around 700-800 test cases.

S. No.	Smoke Testing	Sanity Testing
1	Smoke testing means to verify (basic) that the implementations done in a build are working fine.	Sanity testing means to verify the newly added functionalities, bugs etc. are working fine.
2	This is the first testing on the initial build.	Done when the build is relatively stable.
3	Done on every build.	Done on stable builds post regression.