About the origin of Smoke Testing and the confusion it comes with.
Out of free stories? Get this article for free at https://aiko.dev/smoke-testing-origin/
You know what smoke testing is, right? -Yes! Great, I also thought I’d know. And that also is what a colleague of mine thought. The problem: We knew it meant something different than what the respective other knew.
As mentioned in my article about visualization and prioritization of technical debt: analogies can help a lot with grasping abstract concepts. And this is where a term like “Smoke Testing” comes in handy, as long as everyone involved has the same understanding of the analogy…
The story
A colleague and I were discussing how to verify the functionality of our recent production deployment. He mentioned that we could do some manual smoke testing. This confused me a little bit since that’s not how I understood “smoke testing”.
Luckily for me, I knew where the analogy came from and I could derive what smoke testing in software development actually means from that origin. So I started explaining why smoke testing is called smoke testing and why his understanding is wrong!
