Journey to TDD - Smoke Tests

If you found this article and want to start at the beginning, this series starts here.

Whenever there’s a problem, fault is somewhere.

In my situation, I inherited a working codebase, kept adding features and a new feature broke existing functionality.

I was at fault and definitely knew better. Testing is important and now I knew how important testing is.

Even manual testing after every deploy, also known as smoke tests, is better than nothing.

If engineering points fault to the business, well, manual smoke tests are exactly the solution they will prescribe. Why?

That’s all they know (and have time to do themselves).

When smoke tests solve the problem once, the business will have you apply them to be an integral part of the software development life cycle: (Smoke) Test All the Things!

As a software engineer, smoke tests are something to have in your testing tool belt. Although, you need to have more tools than just that.

I talk how smoke tests are unscalable