Quick Recon: Smoke & Sanity
What This Module Is About
Imagine you're a firefighter. A call comes in. Before you send the whole crew in full gear, someone does a quick sweep: Is the building actually on fire, or is it a burnt-toast situation?
That's smoke testing. 🚒
Now imagine a surgeon who just operated on a patient's knee. Before discharging the patient, they check: Does the knee actually bend now? They don't run a full physical — they check the specific thing that was fixed.
That's sanity testing. 🩺
This module is about knowing when to grab the fire hose vs. the scalpel.
Both are speed tests. Both save time. But they solve completely different problems, happen at different moments in the development cycle, and have different scopes.
What You'll Learn in This Module
- 🔥 What smoke testing is and where the name comes from
- 🧠 What sanity testing is and when it's triggered
- 📊 A clear side-by-side comparison you can use as a daily reference
- ⚡ How to decide in real-time which type of test you need right now
- 🚫 The most common way these two tests get confused — and how to avoid it
Module Lessons
- Smoke Test — The Survival Check — What counts as a critical path and when a build fails the smoke test before you've even started
- Sanity Test — The Sanity Check — How to laser-focus on a specific fix without wasting time on unrelated areas
- Smoke vs Sanity — The Cheat Sheet — A side-by-side breakdown and a decision flowchart you'll bookmark
🏅 Complete all three lessons to earn the First Responder badge — for QAs who know how to triage a build fast and make the right call under pressure.