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Smoke Testing Suite - What it is, Why You Need it, and How to Automate

 Smoke testing is a key software testing type that determines the stability of the deployed software build. The Smoke test suite is applied to further enhance the performance of smoke tests, thereby streamlining and improvising the testing and development process. The most crucial tests in the software product or application are selected in order to build a smoke test suite through which an application's basic functionality is checked. In this article, you will get to know about the smoke testing suite, why you need it and how it can be automated.

What are Smoke tests?

Development teams create smoke tests to verify whether the software application's basic functionality is running properly or not. If it is a failed test scenario, then the deployment is rejected until the basic errors are meted out.

Some of the characteristics of High-quality smoke tests are as follows:

  • Navigating or clicking through almost all the screens of an application
  • Key functionalities such as exporting files, adding to shopping carts, signup forms etc. are tested
  • Visual correctness and layout are verified.

What is a Smoke test suite?

A number of smoke tests are combined into a small suite of tests, so that when the time comes to deliver the application to staging or pre-production environments, developers will have a clear idea about the application's latest version and whether it can be moved to further QA testing process and review or not.

When a hot patch to the production application needs to be released by the teams, then also smoke tests are utilized.

Benefits of the smoke test suite:

  • Productive teams: if the quality of the build is known by teams before the QA process gets initiated, they become more productive
  • QA process becomes effective: Instead of running a larger test suite by the QA teams, it would be wise to apply the smoke testing method so that the issues can be easily detected. QA teams can also minimize the quality related issues to a great extent by simply implementing the practice of smoke testing suite
  • Bugs are detected early: A majority of the bugs are uncovered by the proper application of smoke testing in the early phases of the software development process.

Key aspects that need to be included in a smoke test suite:

Teams can assess and analyze the smoke test suite in order to ascertain whether the entire application needs to be tested or not. The level of testing should also be taken into perspective.

Functional UI testing is considered to be the best fit for smoke testing. In order to uncover new bugs (exploratory functional testing), User Interface (UI) is tested in order to make sure that the previously known bugs are not found again in the application.

The number of tests that can be included:

The number of tests that are included should be easily manageable and thus included in the smoke suite, so that it can be quickly executed, without taking into consideration whether the smoke suite is automated or not. The number of test cases that are recommended on a low end is 20 and on a high end is 50.

If the number is less than 20, then there will be an issue as enough and relevant coverage cannot be done. If the number is more than 50, then there is too much that is being covered.

The value and inclusion of "Automation" activity:

Once the smoke test suite is properly defined, then the next step is to plan and implement automation. The state of the release needs to be quickly determined in the smoke testing activity, which means a smoke test suite should take only a few minutes to execute.

If it is taking half a day or more to run 50 tests, then this means the testing cycle is too slow. For this specific reason, automation comes into perspective.

In order to build new testing automation, the most popular tools focus on browser automation. Of the many tools, the most popular tool is considered to be the Selenium tool through which browsers can be automated by the developers. If modern web applications need to be tested properly, then user behavior needs to be emulated.

The tricky part is that when the application that is in the browser interacts with the users, there are many things that are happening simultaneously, such as real-time font renderings, asynchronous calls being made to the APIs, JavaScript events firing etc.

User behavior can be emulated by teams through a proper automation framework.

Following are a few key points that can optimize the automation activities of the smoke test suite:

  • CI tools such as CircleCI and Jenkins can be leveraged
  • Creating and maintaining tests
  • Executing the tests on a daily basis depending upon the project context.

Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing smoke testing for your specific project then do get connected with a top-notch software testing services company that will provide you feasible testing solutions that are in line with your project specific requirements.

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