Sanity Testing
"Sanity testing and smoke testing are the same thing." — every QA team that's never had a proper conversation about testing terminology. They're not the same. They serve different purposes, trigger at different points, cover different scopes, and fail for different reasons. Conflating them leads
Smoke Testing
A "smoke test" is a quick verification that the most critical functions of a system work after a change.
Testing
Every mature test strategy uses multiple types of tests, each serving a different purpose.
Testing
Smoke testing and sanity testing get conflated constantly. Both are fast, both happen early in the testing cycle, and both catch obvious problems before you waste time on deeper testing. But they serve different purposes, run at different times, and cover different ground. Mixing them up leads to gaps in
Testing
Playwright is a strong choice for smoke testing. It's fast, handles modern web apps well, and has built-in support for parallel execution, auth state persistence, and multiple browsers. This post walks through building a complete smoke test suite with Playwright, from project setup to CI integration. Project
Testing
A deployment pipeline without smoke tests is like a fire sprinkler system with no water pressure test. Everything looks fine until the moment you need it.
Testing
Most smoke test suites fail in one of two ways. Either they're so minimal they miss real problems, or they've grown into a 45-minute regression suite that nobody calls "smoke" with a straight face anymore. Designing a good smoke test suite requires making