Smoke testing is conducted in the initial stages of the software development process to make sure whether the application’s components are functioning properly or not. This testing method does not delve deep into the finer nuances of the application, but rather tests only the major functionalities of an application. It carries out the testing process quickly, thereby ensuring speed of execution. To further enhance the smoke testing process and make it more efficient, smoke testing can be automated. Once the smoke testing process has been automated, the entire testing process becomes even more streamlined. In this article, you will get to know about the process involved in automating smoke testing.

What is smoke testing?

It is a testing method that verifies whether a deployed software build is stable or not. It is used to ascertain if there are any pertinent issues with the application, before moving it to further levels of testing. Common issues in the application are found quickly using this testing method. Software bugs, defects and errors can be easily found and fixed using smoke testing.

The following are the two major benefits of automating smoke testing suite:

1. The testing process is carried out at a faster pace: Once the creation of a test is done, the button needs to be clicked to run all the smoke tests simultaneously. In just a few minutes, results can be attained instead of waiting for hours for a team of testers to complete manual testing.

2. Crucial functionalities are confirmed: If a run fails, then you will be notified immediately so that the major bugs can be addressed before they affect too many users.

The process of automating a smoke test suite:

To be purpose-built and efficient, an easily manageable number of tests should be contained in a smoke test suite, so that it can be executed very quickly, even if it has been fully automated. An approximate range for the number of tests could be from about 20 to 50 tests. The purpose of this preliminary test suite could be defeated if there is too little or too much coverage.

The following are the specific criteria that should be met by each smoke test:

• The core features need only be tested

• Execution should be carried out quickly

• The test should be reproducible indefinitely

• Few or no false positives should be generated.

One of the main reasons to automate smoke testing is that the tests will run faster and more consistently and the results will be returned automatically. There are some good automation tools available. Most tools focus on browser automation and selenium is one of the most efficient testing tools. The user behavior should be properly mimicked to test modern web applications. What is to be focused upon is that the interaction of a user with a browser application is only a fraction of the events that are occurring.

There are many hidden aspects such as CSS-based animations, real-time font-renderings, asynchronous calls to API, JavaScript events firing etc. A comprehensive automation framework will enable teams to both maintain clear visibility and emulate user behavior in all of these elements and functionalities.

Maintaining smoke tests:

Once the smoke test suite has been created and automated, it is important to keep thinking about the maintenance of tests by taking into consideration the following key points:

• Creating and maintaining tests

• Executing on a daily basis

• Developers should be charged with a penalty if their contributions fail to pass

• Continuous Integration should be made possible with tools like CircleCI and Jenkins.