What is a smoke testing and what will it do for me

Question

I thought I understood that a smoke server was used for continous integration to measure the performance and test coverage of a project. Is this basically correct? What does it mean to smoke-test a program? Does it simply mean to continously apply the tests defined on the smoke server to be able to pinpoint performance degradation to a particular time frame?

Answer 1

*checking the basic and critical feature of an application before proceeding the testing is known as smoke testing. *In smoke testing we check the positive flow of basic and critical feature to check if the build is testable or not.

Answer 2

Smoke testing is a set of basic cheap to run tests that precede actual testing. It aims to verify that the build is deployed successfully and that all test env. aspects are running and ready for the actual test process. It saves you bringing the full extent of your testing wrath down a faulty build and just realizing that you have been testing on a bad env. or erroneously deployed build possibly too late.