Smoke Testing – I first ran across this term in a fellow Maker’s garage shop. The Maker was excited because he had applied power to a system, “the Magic Smoke didn’t come out”, and he had passed the smoke test. What he meant was that none of devices in the system where wired incorrectly because they didn’t get hot enough to fry the circuits. The Maker went on to explain that once you let the magic smoke out it was impossible to put the magic smoke back into the devices and the devices where now broken irreparably.
While googling for a handy URL to reference I found that the term Smoke Testing now applies to software as well as hardware. Crazy – software is all magic smoke and it’s impossible to release any magic smoke from software.