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A smoke test is a small, fast test suite covering your most critical flows: sign-in, checkout, the main action your product provides. Reach for it as a gate around a deploy when running your full regression tests on every release is too slow. It answers whether the build is fundamentally working, not whether every feature is correct. Run the smoke tests against the deployment you just shipped:

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When to use it

  • You deploy often and want a fast check that each release is healthy before it takes traffic.
  • Your full regression run takes long enough that you need a faster gate in front of it.
  • You want one signal that covers the real stack end to end, not isolated unit checks.
If your full regression run is already fast enough to gate every deploy, you may not need a separate smoke layer. Smoke testing earns its place when the full run is too slow to block on.

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What counts as a smoke flow

Keep the set to a handful so it stays fast and never becomes a second regression test suite.
  • Flows whose failure is a serious incident: login, checkout, the primary create or submit action.
  • One happy path per flow. Leave edge cases and variants to the regression tests.
  • End-to-end paths over isolated checks, so a single test runs against the real stack.

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Where it runs in your pipeline

  • As a post-deploy check, run it against staging or production with --url-override set to the deployed URL, and hold or roll back the release if it fails.
  • As a pre-deploy gate, run it against a preview or staging environment before promoting the build.
  • For flows whose exact steps vary by environment or feature flag, use an agentic step with a clear goal and a post-condition assertion instead of hard-coding each click.

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Get started

1

Pick your critical flows

List the few paths that must work for the product to be usable, and write one test per flow.
2

Run them as a deploy gate

Run the smoke tests in CI after a deploy. See GitHub Actions or custom setups for your provider.
3

Act on the result

Read the trace for any failure in results, and roll back or hold the release if the smoke tests fail.

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Keeping it fast

  • Budget a few minutes. If the smoke tests grow past that, move the slower flows into the regression tests.
  • Select the subset with a path (momentic run tests/smoke), --labels, or --include/--exclude regex. The include/exclude globs in momentic.config.yaml control discovery, not a single run.
  • Run it against the deployed URL so it checks what shipped, not your local build.

Regression testing

Catch a broader set of regressions on every change.

Agentic testing

Cover flows whose exact steps vary with a goal-driven step.

Run in CI/CD

Run the smoke tests after every deploy.

Results

Read traces and screenshots for any failure.