What You Need to Know About Smoke/Regression Testing

Every project is unique. However, many projects share common features such as: page loads, some type of content, functionality, URL redirect, frequent use, etc. This familiar structure makes it relatively easy to design a Smoke suite, which includes test cases addressing the most critical functionality.

A basic Smoke suite, applied to any project, can include:

• Page loads
• URL redirects
• Basic structure check for each page or page type
• Basic functionality
• Light content
• Screenshots
• Analytic tags – presence validation
• Frequent use
• Local or Selenium Grid Web browsers/Mobile Cloud integration with various device emulators

This level of coverage is possible to implement in a fairly short period of time. Depending on client needs, it could be complemented with distributed reporting and integration on Jenkins, TeamCity or Cloud. I prefer to break out the top four items (Page Load, Url redirects, Structure and functionality checks) into a smaller suite for monitoring purposes.

For a larger scale project, subsequent cases with high/moderate effort in test development and test environment setup would be implemented:

• Mapped User stories
• Database/service validations
• Content match – CMS access
• Full app functionality
• All browsers, mobile emulators, real devices
• Localization
• In-Depth Analytic tags validation

This level of testing is applicable to projects where additional time for automated tests code maintenance is allowed and the Regression suite can be developed. Just like any code base, or a manual QA test plan, the automated test suites require maintenance.

A Smoke suite can be applied to any size or any type of a web or mobile app project by providing monitoring and reporting of an app’s overall health. It’s cheap to implement and affords the Automation engineer more flexibility to pursue new projects, while monitoring existing work with greater ease.