Sanity Testing vs Smoke Testing: Don't Get Confused!

Validating software for its stability and efficiency is essential to maintain customer satisfaction and prevent significant revenue losses. Moreover, in today’s fast-paced and highly competitive software development landscape, quality assurance is more critical than ever.

Of myriad testing modules, smoke tests and sanity tests are two types of software testing that are designed to catch issues early in the development process before they become more significant and costly problems.

Although being used on a regular basis, these two terms have collected some misconceptions around them. It is essential to understand these testing methodologies and thus know the difference between them.

Let’s dive in!

What is Smoke Testing?

Smoke testing is an initial and essential step in software testing. It is a high-level testing process that is performed to verify if the most critical functionalities of the application are working correctly. It is called "smoke testing" because, in the hardware context, smoke might be generated if a major issue occurs. Similarly, if the smoke test fails, it indicates that there is a significant problem in the application.

To better understand the process, read here.

What is Sanity Testing?

Sanity testing is a type of software testing that is performed to quickly verify if the newly added functionalities or changes have not adversely affected the application's critical functionalities. It is called "sanity testing" because it focuses on testing the basic and most important functionalities of the application to ensure that it is still sane and working correctly.

While both smoke testing and sanity testing are used to verify the functionality of the software, there are several key differences between the two:

The other parameters that differentiate the Smoke test and Sanity test include test coverage, test cases, test results, automation, and tester skills.

Check out my detailed blog post to learn more.