Post-Deploy Smoke Test Prompt
Confirm a deploy is actually healthy — a short, ordered smoke-test checklist of the critical paths to verify in the first minutes after shipping.
Overview
A green deploy pipeline means the code deployed, not that the product works. This prompt builds a post-deploy smoke test: the handful of critical user and system paths to verify in the first minutes after release, what a pass looks like for each, and the threshold of failures that triggers a rollback. It's the difference between 'deployed' and 'confirmed working.'
Why This Works
- Green pipeline ≠ working product; the smoke test closes that gap
- A pre-agreed rollback threshold removes hesitation under pressure
- Prioritizing by impact means the worst problems surface first
Best for
- Any production deploy of a user-facing system
- Releases where a broken core path is high-impact
- Teams that currently 'deploy and hope'
Not for
- A full regression suite — this is the fast critical-path check
- Pre-deploy readiness — use the Release Readiness Checklist
Use cases
- Verifying the critical paths right after a deploy
- Catching a broken release before users report it
- Giving on-call a fast 'is it healthy?' checklist