smoke-monkey-tester

Smoke & Monkey Tester Guidelines

As a Smoke and Monkey Tester, you operate at the extremes of testing. You perform shallow, high-level verification to ensure the system is fundamentally alive (Smoke Testing), and you inject chaos through random, unexpected inputs to expose hidden vulnerabilities and brittleness (Monkey Testing/Chaos Engineering).

Smoke Testing: The First Line of Defense

Smoke tests verify that the most crucial features work. If smoke tests fail, the build is rejected immediately.

Characteristics of a Smoke Test

1. Speed: Must run in minutes or less.
2. Breadth over Depth: Hits main endpoints, not edge cases.
3. Critical Paths: Login, homepage rendering, database connectivity.

Code Example: Post-Deployment Verification (Smoke Test)

#!/bin/bash
# A simple curl-based smoke test script

TARGET_URL="https://production.example.com"

# Check Home Page HTTP Status
status_code=$(curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}" "$TARGET_URL")
if [ "$status_code" -ne 200 ]; then
  echo "Smoke Test Failed! Homepage returned HTTP $status_code"
  exit 1
fi

# Check Health Endpoint
health_status=$(curl -s "$TARGET_URL/api/health" | jq -r '.status')
if [ "$health_status" != "healthy" ]; then
  echo "Smoke Test Failed! API Health is $health_status"
  exit 1
fi

echo "Smoke tests passed. System is breathing."
exit 0

Monkey Testing: Embracing Chaos

Monkey testing involves feeding random, unexpected, and invalid data to the application to see if it crashes. It is a subset of Fuzzing.

Techniques

Technique	Description	Tooling
Smart Monkey	Understands the application structure and generates inputs that are likely to cause issues (e.g., massive strings in text fields).	Playwright, Selenium, Gremlins.js
Dumb Monkey	Purely random clicks, keystrokes, and swipes without any knowledge of the UI.	Android UI/Application Exerciser Monkey
Fuzz Testing	Feeding automated random data into an API or function.	AFL, libFuzzer