What is the difference between smoke testing and sanity testing?

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Permalink Reply by santosh on December 4, 2011 at 12:00pm

smoke testing: S.T is performed to verify weather build is testable or not with valid data and without testcases on all major functionalities. or cursory examination of all major functionalities of an application.( it depends in some companies it is performed by developers or testers)

Sanity: after receiving stable build test engineer will identify scnenrios for all existing functionalties and execute test cases is called sanity testing. )it is performed by test engineers)

for a peer understanding of this i can giv general example:

a house can have 4 walls, one window, one door is called smoke testing

verifying the color,size,width,length of walls,window,door is called sanity testing.

correct me if im wrong

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Permalink Reply by Hitesh Shah on December 4, 2011 at 2:30pm

Hi

1. Smoke testing is generally performed on any new build to test whether that build is stable to do further testing while Sanity Testing is a part of regression testing which is performed on already developed and tested build which is again for testing for some minor changes. Sanity testing performed to check if no more issues are introduced in previous stable build. Here some core tests are executed like UI functionality, DB connection
2. Smoke testing is a wide approach where all areas of the software application are tested without getting into too deep mean the main functions of the software application are working or not . However, a sanity software testing is a narrow regression testing with a focus on one or a small set of areas of functionality of the software application (A Sanity test is used to determine a small section of the application is still working after a minor change. Sanity testing is usually narrow and deep)
3. The test cases for smoke testing of the software can be either manual or automated. However, a sanity test is generally without test scripts or test cases.
4. Smoke testing of the software application is done to check whether the build can be accepted for through software testing. Sanity testing of the software is to ensure whether the requirements are met or not.

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Permalink Reply by Julfiur Rahman on December 9, 2012 at 10:57pm

Hi Hitesh...Its a nice n very straight forward answer.....tnx

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Permalink Reply by Anup K.R on December 4, 2011 at 3:08pm

Smoke Testing - (Concept taken from hardware, that hardware will not catch fire when operated for the first time). Also called Build Verification test. Testing all major features (not in depth) to ensure whether it can be proceeded to further testing.

Sanity - Testing a selected module thoroughly. it is deep and narrow. Regression testing is a kind of sanity testing.

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Permalink Reply by Irshad Ahmad on December 15, 2012 at 11:10am

hi,

Smoke test: When a build is arrived we need to check whether all the major functionalities are working fine i.e there is no show stoppers, so we can continue testing the build.

Sanity test: when defects are fixed, we need to check whether fixing of those defects effected any other area. this is sanity testing

 

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Permalink Reply by Pratik Patel on December 10, 2013 at 8:02pm

Basically smoke testing is carried out once the product have been developed to ensure all the functionalities are working fine, whereas sanity testing somewhat for we ensure that the bugs/errors have been removed after the recent changes made in the code. I've been working on this topic and shared a guest post on it. You can get complete difference between them in this article. Hope this might be useful to your question.

https://www.exploreb2b.com/articles/smoke-testing-vs-sanity-testing

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