Smoke Test
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A smoke test is the most basic sanity check: does the app even start? Does it not immediately crash? It's named after old electronics testing — if you turn it on and smoke comes out, you've failed the smoke test. Modern equivalent: does localhost:3000 load?
Real Talk
Smoke tests are a minimal set of tests that verify the most critical functionality of a system works after a build or deployment. They run fast and catch catastrophic failures early. Passing the smoke test means it's worth running the full test suite.
When You'll Hear This
"Run the smoke tests after deploying to staging before QA starts." / "The smoke test failed — the app crashes on startup, don't bother with anything else."
Related Terms
CI Testing
CI Testing is running all your tests automatically every time someone pushes code.
End-to-End Test (E2E)
An end-to-end test is like hiring a robot to be a user.
Sanity Check
A sanity check is you quickly checking that the most obvious, basic thing works before going deeper.
Test Pyramid
The Test Pyramid is a strategy for how many of each test type to have.