What is smoke testing?

It is a testing method wherein it verifies whether the software build that has been deployed is stable or not. It also makes sure that the crucial software functionalities are working as expected. It is performed before regression testing and functional testing, so that the costs and time can be saved to a certain extent.

Following are the seven benefits of smoke testing:

1. The adaptability factor: The efficiency of smoke testing can be maximized without using the automation domain. This is because high degree of agility and flexibility is processed.

2. Key resources are saved to quite an extent: Depending upon the system's sophistication, it often takes 15 mins to 2 hours (approximately) to perform smoke tests. The amount of time needed can be reduced through the tactical use of automated smoke testing.

3. Taking care of those threats that are related to integration: When new capabilities are added to a pre-existing software program through the integration platform, smoke testing is considered to be beneficial.

4. Early recognition of show-stopping bugs: Problems/issues are identified in the system, product or application in the early phases of software development through the smoke testing platform. Though only 20% or less of the total test cases are covered by the smoke tests platform, but, 80% or more of the defects are identified.

5. Testing efficiency is enhanced: A lot of the efforts are saved by the testing team through the smoke testing platform. The team need not expend their efforts on a build that hardly works and is full of bugs. Hence, all these instabilities can be identified by the smoke testing platform

6. Regression issues are tackled adequately: If there are any issues that have been detected during smoke testing, the development team can start performing and debugging root cause analysis.

7. The risk of failure is reduced: After the smoke testing process is conducted, a progress sheet is prepared wherein bug related reports are entered in a systematic format.