Smoke Tests
The cheapest behavioral check against a live deployment: hit /health,
create one record, read it back, delete it. If any step fails, roll back.
Smoke tests answer “is the deployed system alive enough to behave at all?”
before canary analysis has enough traffic to judge.
Sensor properties
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Oracle strength | Medium — “alive” is a weak claim, but a true one |
| Independence | High — exercises the real deployed artifact end to end |
| Scope | System |
| Feedback latency | Seconds |
| Actionability | Blocking — a failed smoke test halts the rollout |
| Type | Retrospective |
What it cannot detect
Anything that requires real load, real data shapes, or real user behavior. A smoke test passing is necessary for the deployment to proceed and sufficient for almost nothing else.