When you push new changes to the production environment, you need to be confident that the essential features are still working. Smoke testing gives you a fast, targeted check to make sure the most important parts of your app hold up, catching any issues before they impact users or disrupt your workflow.
In this guide, we’ll get into the details of smoke testing – why it matters and how to implement it in your production environment. We’ll also walk through detailed examples, best practices, and tips for automating and monitoring smoke tests to ensure continuous stability in your system.
What is smoke testing?
Smoke testing is a type of preliminary testing conducted to verify that the most important features of a software application are functioning correctly after a new build or deployment. The primary objective of smoke testing is to ensure that the critical parts of the application, such as the login system, navigation, and primary workflows, work without any major errors.
The build is considered stable enough for more in-depth testing if these tests pass. If they fail, it’s a signal to halt and fix issues immediately. In production environments, smoke testing serves as the first line of defense against deployment failures that could otherwise lead to service outages or critical errors experienced by users.
Key characteristics of smoke testing
- Broad but shallow: Smoke testing doesn’t examine the functionality deeply but checks whether the major components work.
- Fast: The goal is to run these tests quickly and get immediate feedback after deployment.
- Automated: Although you can run smoke tests manually, automation ensures consistency and efficiency, especially in production environments.
- Frequent: Smoke tests are run every time a new build or change is deployed to production, ensuring continuous stability.
Why is smoke testing important in production?
- Detects critical failures early: In production environments, critical issues can disrupt services and negatively impact end-users. Smoke testing catches these issues before they escalate.
- Reduces downtime and business risk: Since smoke testing is conducted immediately after deployment, it reduces the chance of exposing end-users to broken features or outages, thus minimizing downtime and business risk.
- Optimizes QA and developer efficiency: Smoke testing helps ensure that only stable builds reach further testing stages, which saves time for quality assurance (QA) teams and developers by preventing the need for troubleshooting deeply broken builds.
- Minimizes negative user experience: By catching and resolving issues early, smoke testing ensures that customers don’t experience disruptions when interacting with your application, thus maintaining a positive user experience.
How to implement smoke testing in production in 5 steps
1. Identify critical functionalities
Before you can begin smoke testing, identify the most critical functionalities in your application. These are the features that are essential for the core operation of your business and the user experience. Without them, your product would fail to deliver its intended value.
For example, on an e-commerce website, critical functionalities usually include:
- Login and authentication: Can users log in and access their accounts?
- Product search and filtering: Can users find products based on search terms or filters?
- Shopping cart: Can users add items to the cart and proceed to checkout?
- Payments: Can users complete a purchase using valid payment methods?
Similarly, for a banking application, critical functionalities might include:
- Account overview: Can users view their account balance and recent transactions?
- Fund transfers: Can users transfer funds between accounts or to other users?
- Transaction history: Can users review their past transactions?
2. Create simple and effective test cases
Once critical functionalities are identified, the next step is to create test cases for each of these features. Since smoke testing focuses on high-level checks, your test cases should be:
- Simple: The goal is not to perform detailed validations but to confirm that basic operations work.
- Comprehensive enough: While the tests should be shallow, they must still cover key user workflows.
- Fast: Smoke tests need to run quickly to provide fast feedback on whether the deployment is stable.
Example of test cases for an e-Commerce platform:
- Login: Ensure that users can log in with valid credentials.
- Product search: Search for a product by name and confirm that search results are returned.
- Add to cart: Select a product and add it to the shopping cart.
- Checkout: Proceed to checkout and confirm the page loads correctly.
3. Automate smoke testing
Automation is crucial for efficient smoke testing, especially when running tests frequently in production environments. Automated smoke tests can be easily integrated into your Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, ensuring they are triggered automatically after each deployment.
Some popular tools for automating smoke tests are:
- Selenium: A widely used open-source tool for automating browser-based applications.
- Cypress: A JavaScript-based testing framework known for its ease of use in web application testing.
- Jest and Puppeteer: For Node.js-based applications, Jest can be combined with Puppeteer for fast smoke tests.
4. Integrate smoke testing into CI/CD pipeline
Integrate your automated smoke tests into your CI/CD pipeline to make smoke testing as efficient as possible. Use tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI, or Azure DevOps to ensure that the stability of critical features is verified immediately after every build and deployment.
At GAT, we provide the flexibility to fit seamlessly into your existing workflow, no matter how your team operates. Whether you're using Jira, TestRail, GitHub, or another platform, Global App Testing integrates effortlessly, allowing different team members to launch tests and receive results without disrupting their process. Our platform is built to adapt, giving you the control to manage testing on your terms.
5. Monitor test results in real-time
After the smoke tests run, it’s important to monitor the results in real time. You can also set up alerts and dashboards so that the team is notified if any test fails. Many CI/CD tools and monitoring platforms allow you to visualize and track the results of each deployment and test run.
- If the tests pass: The build proceeds to more thorough testing or goes live for end-users.
- If the tests fail: The deployment is rolled back, and the issue is investigated and fixed before any further testing or release.
Real-world example of smoke testing in production
Let’s look at an example of a banking platform that integrates smoke testing into its production pipeline.
Banking application smoke test
For a banking platform, the smoke tests might verify that:
- Login: Users can authenticate and access their accounts.
- Account overview: Users can view their account balances.
- Fund transfer: Users can transfer funds between their accounts.
- Logout: Users can log out without any issues.
For example, the development team automates these tests using Selenium and integrates them into their Jenkins CI/CD pipeline. After every deployment, the tests are triggered automatically, and the results are monitored through Jenkins dashboards.
Best practices for smoke testing in production
- Run tests regularly: Ensure that smoke tests are run after every deployment, even for minor updates.
- Focus on critical paths: Always prioritize testing the most critical user workflows, such as login, checkout, or payment processing.
- Keep tests lightweight: Smoke tests should be quick to run and provide feedback in minutes, not hours.
- Monitor performance: In addition to functional testing, consider checking performance metrics like page load times to detect performance bottlenecks early.
- Test in production-like environments first: Run smoke tests in staging or pre-production environments before deploying to production to catch any major issues early.
Conclusion
Smoke testing is a vital step in ensuring the stability of your application after each deployment. To sum it up, to implement smoke testing in production, you should:
- Focus on critical functionalities,
- Create simple yet effective test cases,
- Automate the process, and
- Monitor results.
This way, you can minimize the risk of deployment failures and provide a seamless experience for your users. Integrating smoke tests into your CI/CD pipeline further streamlines the process and ensures that only stable builds make it to production.
When implemented correctly, smoke testing acts as a robust safety net, catching critical issues before they reach your end-users and protecting your business and customers.
Global App Testing (GAT) simplifies smoke testing by allowing you to execute manual tests through our intuitive platform quickly. You can upload or input your test cases, launch tests, and receive results in as little as 2 hours.
With seamless integrations into tools like Jira, TestRail, and GitHub, GAT fits smoothly into your existing workflow. Additionally, GAT offers fast execution times, a large network of global testers, and detailed bug reports, ensuring comprehensive test coverage and quick identification of issues. This approach helps maintain high software quality while saving time for your development team.
Ready to streamline your smoke testing process? Experience faster results and higher test coverage with Global App Testing. Schedule a call today and ensure your software is market-ready with minimal effort!
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