Purpose of Smoke Testing

Things to Think About when putting together a Smoke Test plan

October 28, 2019 by cryan.com

Smoke Testing is a critical part of Quality Assurance Testing. It's usually done to make sure that a deployment was done successfully. (Such as Code Freeze or Production Release)

When considering putting together a Smoke Test plan for you Software as a Service (SaS) application, here are some things to think about.

Five Things to Consider in Smoke Testing

1. Critical path - Smoke test should focus on the critical path that customers will take to use your application.
2. Focus on Making the Test Quick - The goal of smoke testing it to make sure they run fast. There shouldn't be complex steps to make sure the software works. Depending on the application, the smoke test should be completed in 20-minutes. Otherwise your simply running a modified version of a regression test.
3. Logs should be open - Keep the Console logs open when running the test. (People do forget this!) This way you can catch errors as test are being run - such as tracking servers throwing 404s.
4. Touch features that are most likely to break - Some Test should be testing complex part of the application that is likely to break - or have broken in the past. Examples might be the login process for existing users or uploading large files.
5. Special Test for Production - In production smoke test, focus on features that are specific to production - such as load balance servers testing - as you may not have that in the test environment.

Test Early and Often

These are just some of the things that I think about when putting together an effective smoke test plan.

What are some of the things that you consider when forming a Smoke Test strategy?