Smoke testing is the initial testing process exercised to check whether the software under test is ready/stable for further detailed testing. Smoke tests are also known as build verification tests.

Smoke Tests Need to be Cheap and Fast

When you design smoke test cases, always focus on speed of execution because these tests will be executed many times, over and over again.

Basic rules

• Challenge your QA team by asking the question "How do we do smoke testing?"
• Have documented how you do smoke testing so everyone on the team can read it and propose improvements to the process
• There should be around 20 to 30 test cases
• The test cases should be easy enough to be tested for each new release
• The smoke testing should be done before any deep testing
• The team that merge the code should do the smoke testing
• The smoke tests should cover every requirement of the software.
• The smoke tests should not be ambiguous
• There should not be any missing function not covered in smoke test
• The smoke tests should be an overview /major functions. It should cover any in depth functionality.
• The smoke tests should not be large in number.

Why is it called smoke testing?

The term Smoke Testing was originally used in the hardware testing, where the initial check was done to verify if the hardware piece did not catch the fire or smoked after ig got turned on.

Examples of test cases

• Is home page accessible?
• Can users log in?
• Is it possible to submit new orders?
• Is it possible to add new items to the cart?
• Are notification e-mails delivered?

Automate smoke tests

It's just a matter of time until someone decides to cut the costs. What will you do then? Will you stop testing? Or will you test just the half ot the application? Way better idea is to run smoke tests automatically. This will give you scalable, cost effective and time saving solution, how to keep the quality of the product high.

Pitfalls

• Don't go too broad
• Don't have too detailed tests
• Don't confuse smoke testing with regression testing
• Don't confuse smoke testing with sanity testing