Smoke Testing
A "smoke test" is a quick verification that the most critical functions of a system work after a change. The name comes from hardware testing: you power on a new circuit board and check if smoke comes out. If it doesn't, you proceed with more thorough
Testing
Every mature test strategy uses multiple types of tests, each serving a different purpose. Smoke, regression, and acceptance testing are three of the most commonly used — and most commonly confused. They're not interchangeable. Running the wrong type of test at the wrong time wastes time at best and
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 Setup
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. Smoke tests in CI/CD serve one purpose: stop bad builds before they cause damage. If the app doesn't boot, a critical
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 deliberate