What is smoke testing?
Smoke testing is a fast, shallow check that the most important parts of a build work at all, before deeper testing begins.
The name comes from hardware: switch the device on and see whether it smokes. In software, a smoke test runs a small set of checks, such as whether the app loads, users can sign in and the core page renders, to decide if a build is worth testing further.
Smoke tests are deliberately quick, usually minutes, and run immediately after a deploy. If they fail, the build is rejected or rolled back straight away.
Example
After every staging deploy, a smoke suite checks that the homepage loads, sign-in works and the dashboard shows data. A failed sign-in stops the pipeline before the two-hour regression run starts.
Best practices
- Keep the suite small and fast, ideally under five minutes
- Cover availability of the core journeys, not every edge case
- Run it automatically after every deploy
- Treat a failure as a stop signal for the release
Frequently asked questions
Is smoke testing the same as sanity testing?
They are related but different. Smoke testing checks that a build is broadly stable. Sanity testing checks that a specific change or fix behaves as expected.
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