What is a smoke test and why is it useful?

Author: Mariaa Martin

It is a testing method that verifies whether an employed software build is stable or not. It verifies whether the key features of an application are working as expected or not. QA team gets the necessary confirmation from this testing method on whether to proceed with further rounds of testing or not.

Following are four factors that depict the strategic importance of smoke testing:

1. Regression bugs are troubleshot faster:If any bugs are found in the smoke testing process, then the development team can initiate the troubleshooting activity much earlier and perform root cause analysis. There is no need to wait until the full test suite results are displayed. This is because smoke testing suites provide high coverage.

This suite provides a sketch map of an application’s quality. If the build is somewhat viable, then there is a scope of gaining efficiency, if partial regression testing is continued by QA on that build, while smoke test bugs are fixed by developers.

  1. A productive QA team can be expected: QA teams will have job satisfaction and will be more productive when they gain more confidence about higher viability builds that will be able to pass through the smoke test successfully.
  2. Show-stopping bugs are detected earlier: There are some reports by organizations that state around 80% of the bugs that are discovered are uncovered and fixed simply by configuring a smoke testing suite and executing it. This can also mean that 20% or less of the test cases covered by smoke testing are able to detect around 80% or more of the bugs. This activity makes smoke testing highly efficient.
  3. The performance of the QA team is enhanced: There can be scenarios where QA teams can waste their efforts and time by running a larger test suite, instead of just running a smoke test through which bugs or issues can be discovered easily and effectively. In this manner, resources and time are wasted, which could have otherwise been spent by teams on performing other tests or maintaining an automation toolset.

Smoke testing has got its name from hardware repair systems wherein a smoke test is performed on pipelines to know whether they are working or not. Similarly, this smoke test is a quick test performed as a part of the software testing, to see if the application "catches on fire" when a new build is deployed and tested for the first time.