what is smoke testing? And at what circumstances we can use smoke testing in our project

Question

I don't have a clear idea about smoke testing and sanity testing, some books say that both are same but some tester in some project called as a smoke testing and some tester in some project called as sanity testing, So please give me clear cut idea about my question.

Answer 1

Sorry but there is no clear-cut. Like you explain in your question there is no consensus on the definition, or at least on the difference between sanity and smoke.

Now about smoke tests (or sanity tests!), those are the tests that you can run quickly to get a general idea of how your System Under Test (SUT) behaves. For software testing, this will obviously contain some kind of installation, setup, playing around with the feature and shutdown. If nothing goes wrong, then you now you can go on with your testing. This provides a quick feedback to the team and avoid starting a longer test campaign only to realise that some major features are broken and the SUT is not really usable.

This definition stands for both manual and automated tests. For example, if you use Jenkins (for CI) and Robot Framework (for test automation), you could create 2 jobs in Jenkins: smoke tests and full tests (using tags, this is straightforward). Smoke test job could last a couple of minutes (or max 15 minutes let's say) and the full tests job could as long as needed. Thus the smoke test job gives you a quick feedback on the SUT build (if your smoke tets is a child project of the SUT build of course)

Answer 2

Think of the analogy of testing a new electronic device. The first thing you do is turn it on to see if it starts smoking. If it does, there's something fundamentally wrong, so no additional testing either can be done or is worth doing.

For a website, the simplest smoke test is to go to the website and see if the http response is 200. If not, there's no point in testing further. A more useful smoke test might be to hit every page once.

Smoke tests should run as fast as possible. The goal is quick feedback so that you can make a decision.

As for the difference between smoke tests and sanity tests... There is no significant difference. What you call them is irrelevant, as long as everyone in your organization has the same basic understanding. What's important is a quick verification that the system under test is running and has no blatantly obvious flaws.

Answer 3

The smoke test is designed to see if the device seems to work at all. - This is to determine if we can go on with more extensive testing or if something fundamental is broken.

The sanity tests are designed to test the most frequent usecases.

Example: You are testing a cellphone. Smoketest - Does it start up without crashing/starting to smoke etc. does it seem to work good enough to perform more extensive testing?

Sanity test - Can you place/recieve calls/messages - the most basic and most used features.

These are both done often and should be quick to run through, they are NOT extensive tests.

Answer 4

Smoke testing also known as Build version Testing. Smoke testing is the initial testing process exercised to check whether the software under test is ready/stable for further testing. sanity testing is a type of testing to check the capability of a new software version is able to perform well enough to accept it for a major testing effort.

Answer 5

Smoke Testing is testing the basic and critical features of an application, before going ahead and doing thorough testing of that application. Note: Only if the Smoke testing passes, we can carry ahead with other stages of testing, else the product is not fit to be tested and should be sent to Development team.

Sanity Testing: There is no clear definition as such, but this one I picked up from the Internet Check the entire application at the basic level, focuses on Breadth rather than length.