Smoke test

Why

When a (major) production deployment is planned it is a good practice to make sure all critical features work as expected. In most cases smoke testing can be done before deployment but should also be done after deployment.

How

Typically, a smoke test is a subset of test cases that cover the most important functionality of a system. These test cases should be documented to make sure there is a common understanding of what features should be tested in a smoke test.

Although it is possible to automate a smoke test, a human performing a final check to make sure everything works as expected is always better.

A smoke test should address questions like: - Does the application run - Does the user interface work (as expected) on all common devices - Can I complete the critical flow of the application - Do integrations work as inspected

Tools like Siderunner could be used to continuously smoke test an application but are no replacement for human testing after a deployment.

Real life example