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Software Engineering vocabulary · Testing

Smoke test

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, smoke test means: A quick, basic test that checks the most important functions work at all, for example that the app starts and users can log in, before deeper testing.

In Turkish: duman testi, temel işlevsellik testi

How it is used

Often run right after a deploy: 'Run a smoke test on staging.' If the smoke test fails, there is no point running the full test suite. The name comes from hardware testing: switch the device on and see whether smoke comes out.

Example sentences

  1. After each deploy, the pipeline runs a smoke test against the login and search pages.

  2. The smoke test failed on staging, so we stopped the release.

Common collocations

  • run a smoke test
  • the smoke test fails
  • post-deploy smoke test
  • smoke testing
  • stagingAn environment set up to be as close as possible to production, where a team checks a release one last time before real users get it.
  • deployTo put a new version of software onto servers or devices so that it starts running there, for example in a test environment or for real users.
  • test suiteA collection of tests that are run together, for example all the unit tests of a project or every test for the payment module.
  • regressionA bug where something that used to work stops working after a change, such as a new feature breaking an old one.

More terms: Testing

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