How To Implement Smoke Testing In Production And Staging?

Did all of you know that Smoke Testing helps us rapidly check the condition of an app by running a group of end-to-end tests created to check the most vital user flows? It must be run after a new deployment and at proper intervals after that.

Smoke Testing is entirely different from complete regression testing in 2 ways:

  • The coverage is extensive and deep. Its main motive is to thoroughly test the functionality in the shortest time. Suppose you look at it in that way. In that case, regression testing should be thoroughly done and ensure that any of the previous functionalities were not negatively influenced by the new changes brought about due to a news release.
  • Smoke Testing must be rapidly compared to regression testing, as its main target is to check the central user flows in an application rapidly.

Now, let’s go through some popular smoke testing examples and questions before discussing greater practical issues.

Frequently Asked Questions About Smoke Testing:

  1. Should smoke tests be run on production or staging?

Ans. Practically, it should be run on both. Smoke Testing is crucial on staging, as it helps you be updated about integral problems quicker. A detailed regression testing suite normally takes some time to run at the right speed based on the size of the app. This also means that after new commits or releases, you might have to wait long before knowing whether the code broke something significant.

In the case of smoke testing, you get instant feedback on the condition of a new commit or a new release. Most of the time, in staging or testing environments, you get to see a detailed regression test after a smoke test.

  1. How much time does a smoke test suite take?

Ans. If you want the smoke test to be more effective, it should be quick. The proper upper limit must be 5 minutes for a tiny app, 10 for a medium app, and 15 for a gigantic app. The lesser, the better.

  1. Is smoke testing a good replacement for regression testing?

Ans. Even if you go through a smoke testing example, you’ll always notice that it isn’t capable of covering the complete functionality of an app, and its main motive is entirely different from regression testing. For a good product, the best decision is to have both.

Now, if you don’t have any of them, you at least need to have a smoke test suite, which is a big leap in the positive direction, as it will be easy to find lots of critical bugs before they turn into trouble.

Check out : Why is Risk Analysis important in Cloud Regression Testing

1st Option.

Creating a smoke testing solution from the beginning. 

Let’s find out what we need to construct a smoke testing solution from the beginning. Our main requirement is that the smoke test suite should function after a brand new deployment and consistently run at the perfect intervals.

The initial need for a good smoke testing solution is uncomplicated if you have a well-organized build procedure or a CI infrastructure in the proper position. You can add one more step in the build script to run the smoke tests in this situation.

Select a Testing Framework

After that, select an excellent end-to-end testing framework. If you are making use of JavaScript for your tests, you’ll get lots of great options:

All the frameworks have their positives and negatives. Just like, Cypress and Taiko solely support Chromium-based browsers. Selenium is the most difficult to handle. Meanwhile, Cypress, Taiko, and Puppeteer have an amazing tester experience.

Select a Test Runner (It’s a choice)

In case your testing framework does not integrate one, you need to select a test runner (ensure that it works fine with the testing framework selected by you.)

Even in this case, there are lots of options to select from:

Get the Coding

After that, you need to code your tests either manually or use a proper test recorder like Selenium IDE. One thing is to be noted, and if you end up using Selenium IDE, your framework options will be less.

Then, your tests will be ready; you have to confirm that they are properly gone through in a repository of the main app or some other place) and ensure that the CI gets it after it runs.

Select a CI platform (if you don’t have it)

It would be a waste to say that if you do not have a proper CI, you’d require one of them to run your smoke tests. You’ll get lots of options in this case as well.

Running a Test Suite at Frequent Intervals

Well, if you wished to run your smoke tests at frequent time intervals, it would be a different beast. In this situation, the CI infrastructure is most of the time of no use, as you’d require a continuously switched-on infrastructure to run the tests consistently. So there are, most of the time, 2 options in these situations.

It’s great to have a consistent machine in the cloud to run your tests. But, first, fix a cron job for starting the smoke test suite at the best interval.

You must prefer setting up your tests in a server-less environment.

In this situation, the without server function can be fixed to run at particular intervals natively, in the absence or requirement of any corn job.

2nd Option.

Making use of a web testing tool made for this purpose.

As we have noticed in the last section, putting up a web smoke testing solution from the beginning might turn out to be a hard task. If you have a proper CI infrastructure, you’ll get out of it easily, but if you wish to run a test suite consistently, it’s hard to prevent the implementation and maintenance of extra tooling. 

All the home solutions would become a technical debt; with time, the focus moves to putting tests instead of handling the basic infrastructure on which they function. Based on these assumptions, selecting a tool specially built for this reason is usually the smartest Option that will repay innumerable times in the short run. To provide you with the best idea regarding what these tools can do, we need to go through this list:

  • With a proper tool, you only need to make tests and run them most of the time. There is no requirement to select frameworks, test runners, CI Platforms, or test recorders. They are well meshed into one product and hidden from you.
  • Webhooks make it easy for you to run a test suite whenever required.
  • You can set a test suite to run at frequent intervals with the help of an inbuilt scheduler.
  • You can also get the complete report of the previously run test and the statistics of all the last run tests.

Concluding Words

Smoke Testing is an important section of a Software Development pipeline. Whatever the case be, it is mostly ignored and understood in the wrong way. Like all other tests, fixing and handling a custom-made solution is hard and costly, with the results mostly being suboptimal.

Those are usually the problem areas most modern testing tools attempt to solve. 

Using specific tools for putting in place a smoke testing solution is normally an excellent choice for the adoption time, prices, and complete developer/ tester satisfaction.

The team at Hikeqa, a provider of the best Quality Assurance services, aims to do just that. So feel free to talk to us about all kinds of Smoke Testing requirements.

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