Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Shipping fast is great until the wrong thing ships fast. A CI/CD pipeline can move code from commit to production in minutes, but speed alone does not tell you whether a login still works, a checkout flow still completes, or a critical form still submits. That is the job of CI/CD testing. The best pipelines do more than pass builds. They catch small problems before they become customer-facing ones, using the right mix of unit, integration, API, browser, smoke, and post-deployment tests.

Smoke testing checks whether a new build is stable enough to test. Sanity testing checks whether a specific fix or change works as expected. Both are quick validation techniques, but they happen at different stages for different reasons. The easiest way to tell them apart: if you just deployed a new build and want to know if core features are still standing, that’s a smoke test.