From Smoke Testing to User Acceptance: A Comprehensive Guide to Software Testing Stages

Smoke testing, sanity testing and user acceptance testing are considered to be important methods of the Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) process. Smoke testing is focused on ensuring that the crucial functionalities are working as expected. Sanity testing is conducted after the successful completion of smoke testing and finally, user acceptance testing is conducted at the final phase of the software testing process to ensure that the product is built as per the user's requirements. In this article, you will get to know about smoke, sanity and user acceptance testing.

1. Smoke Testing:

What is Smoke testing?

This testing method is a subset of acceptance testing. This testing method verifies whether the deployed software build is stable or not. It makes sure that the system's important functionalities are working as expected or not. Early major issues are detected, so that resources and time can be saved to a great extent. Smoke testing lets the team know whether the product or application can be moved forward to further types of testing.

Benefits of smoke testing:

· The integration risk is minimal

· Fewer resources and time are spent on testing

· Major issues are detected early.

Limitations of smoke testing:

The most crucial paths are verified by this testing method, which in turn, means less crucial functionalities are ignored and hence in certain scenarios, the bugs may go unnoticed.

2. Sanity testing:

What is Sanity testing?

It is basically considered a subset of regression testing. The changes that have been made to the code are working properly or not is verified by sanity testing. Once the product is passed by the smoke testing method, then after, sanity testing method is initiated and executed.

Benefits of sanity testing:

· Core issues are quickly identified

· No specific need for creating and maintaining documentation

· The time spent on regression testing is reduced.

Limitations of sanity testing:

The scope is narrow for sanity testing and the edge cases are not covered. Upon that, the interaction between the existing features and the new feature is also avoided, which can in turn lead to certain issues being missed.

3. User Acceptance Testing:

What is User Acceptance Testing (UAT)?

It is conducted in the last phase of the software development process when the product is almost ready. End-users will be taking the responsibility to test the product or application in a real-time production environment. It is conducted after unit, integration and system testing. The user's feedback is taken into perspective and then if need be required, potential changes or modifications are done to the product to further evaluate the quality of the software product or application.

Benefits of UAT:

· Ongoing maintenance costs are kept as low as possible

· The risks of defects that have been identified in production are reduced to a great extent

· End-user happiness is increased.

Limitations of User acceptance testing:

Users are solely responsible for testing the product and application in a real-time production environment. If the users are not properly guided or if the users do not test the product or application in a methodical manner, there might be issues arising post-launch of the product or application.

Conclusion: If you are looking forward to implementing smoke, sanity and user acceptance testing for your specific project, then do get connected with a leading software testing services company that will provide you strategic advice and support from a testing standpoint, keeping in perspective your business and project specific requirements.

About the author: I am a technical content writer focused on writing technology specific articles. I strive to provide well-researched information on the leading market savvy technologies.