Probably, the most important test you should pay your attention to is a so-called “smoke test”.Here we’ll explain you what a smoke test is and how to increase its efficiency. How to construct a smoke test Smoke test must be one of your most significant tests. Usually, the purpose of such test is to see if the latest version delivered to Quality Assurance deserves further consideration. The smoke test is essential as it its very time saving both for the Research and Development and Quality Assurance.

The Functions of Proper Smoke Test:

• Quick run – it must last for minutes and check only the most important functions

• Quick failure – once a failure is identified, the smoke test must stop and run a failure notification

•It must explore a wide range of functionality, concentrating on breadth instead of depth

•This test must need a minimal configuration of the tested app

•The smoke test must be configured to run against every build

•It must adapt as the tested application develops

•This test should act as a model for latest test automation

If you manage to organize your smoke test to cover all these objectives you will certainly save time and costs in the long term. Your test must be a model that represents your best experiences which your Quality Assurance team can use for creating their own tests.

If you’ve never made a smoke test, start slow. At first, the smoke test must gradually verify even a single piece of functionality. With time, you should expand its coverage but stay concentrated on the quality of the test. The good smoke test must run easily and consistently.

Executing your qa services on a regular basis.After creating your smoke test, you should automate its performance. Automated QA includes a device called Automated Build Studio which is able to automate your TestComplete tests and make them act when a new build is brought to QA. This procedure is called Continuous Integration.

The main advantage of Continuous Integration server can save time required to execute your test automation. Creating a CI server you can not only release your QA engineers from having to manually run their tests. However, you’ll quickly detect the tests that can’t run to completion and may need more careful examination. Moreover, a lot of Continuous Integration server publishes the test results that provide great visual access to the efforts of automation.

Keep Your Purpose In Mind

The main purpose of test automation is to save time, costs and increase the quality. It can save you from having to manually test the existing functionality, which, in its turn, allows you to concentrate on the areas not included in automation. But that is only true as long as your test automation works consistently and the results are clearly reported to all who may require them.