What is Smoke Testing?

Smoke Testing name emerged from hardware testing,when we get new hardware and power it on and if smoke comes we will not proceed with testing.

Smoke Testing is also called as Build Verification Testing(BVT).

Smoke testing ensures that whether the build can be accepted for testing or not.Basically it checks the stability of the build.Smoke testing is performed to ensure that critical functionalities are working fine.We do not perform detailed testing.

The purpose of smoke testing is to reject a badly broken application so that testing team does not waste any time.Smoke testing is done to check normal health of  an application and also ensures we can do further testing.This testing is usually scripted.

eg.

Suppose we have Employee Management system which contains Employee module and Admin module.For this application we can perform smoke testing by ensuring all the major functionalities like New Employee is able to login,whether all the screens are available etc.