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Thursday 27 February 2014

Smoke, A Testing Strategy


Vast number of products have been deployed into market every day by the organizations. All that they need is customers Satisfaction means a product with no single bug. Is it possible? Of course, It needs an endless exhaust testing, but very impractical. Defects of a product should be identified at the early stages of the process else fixing of that costs too much. 

What is a smoke test? 
 Starting with the definition, smoke test is a act performed after developing and before testing. It is a set of test cases for minimal functionality that needs to be work fine before starting to the actual testing. This test can be performed by the developers on their site or by testers before they go to finer detailed testing. The innovative strategy of the smoke test is to save the valuable time of the tester. 

How to perform it?
Smoke test can be done not only with manual but also by automation script. A set of scripts will be developed by the team and those scripts are make run when every new build was deployed to the testing environment. Once smoke test is implemented in software development life cycle, the overall product quality is improved and sensitivity to producing high quality software increased.

A smoke test will just follow a straight forward approach in testing their functional area. It needs to satisfy its objectives while doing it. Few of the objectives like "Does the application ready to go to test?", "Does the application is performing as intended","Does the application respond as expected for positive actions?" At least one positive test case must be designed for every feature in the application. All these tests are executed by either manual team or automation team.

Advantages of Smoke Test:
  • Saves time and cost of product, identifies defects in the early stage which saves the time and reduces huge costs in fixing the defects
  • Identifies major problems, a good design smoke test helps to identify the major problems during test. Also uncovers the defects arise because of wrong setup configuration during design.
  • Minimize risk in product quality, prevent problematic integration towards the application and  taking control over project.


Happy Testing...




  A Journey towards testing.