What can Smokex do for me?

October 9, by Adrian Quintas

Smokex provides a powerful engine to create any kind of automated requests and we want to share with you a bunch of common use cases from our users.

I have an application without tests... You can create any test in no time, just write the request and set any expectation to verify the information received is correct. This will create a new test without having to write any line of code in your application!

Can I use it to know if my application is up? Yes indeed! Just create a workflow to make a request to the desired URL and Smokex will automatically notify if the response from the server is not correct.

I need to send a keep alive message to my host... No problem, just as easy as creating a new workflow and set a cron sentence to specify when Smokex should send the request to your host.

You can also send requests and expect a minimum response time, if your application takes more time to send the response Smokex will notify you so you can take a look at the current performance of your system!

Liking the new #nocode trend? You can consume and send data from third parties using a workflow, this means you don't even need to write a backend to work with your data

smoke tests automated requests application performance #nocode

How smoke tests started protecting our releases

August 23, by Adrian Quintas

This is the story about how things broke and got fixed.

I've working with different companies in different states, and with different mindsets. But one at of the best places I'd worked at I (we) learned how smoke tests can have a huge impact in your daily workflow. We deployed several times per day and we had lot of tests we were confidence enough with our releases, because nothing can go wrong right? right?

Well... you know the answer already, LOT of things can go wrong and one of responsibilities is to minimize those risks.

Long story short, one day like any other day we made some changes in our application and ended up missing part of the code on the release final (*yikes*). Our nice CD pipeline compiles, run all the tests, etc... all good, green light, we are good to go!. But we weren't.

Took not so long to start getting complains from our users that were seeing a blank page where our application should be. In our local environment everything was ok, we had our Kubernetes running several pods and everything looked good... After we found out we had missing half of the application code and immediately rolled back to the previous release.

After our regular post mortem we decided to add smoke testing to our pipeline. It would be really simple, login with an internal testing user, make a couple of requests and make checks on the data received from the server. We added a new step to the CD pipeline so if for any reason a smoke test fails we immediately roll back to the latest known good release. This or any other problem can happen again, so we wanted to ensure it will never happen again.

After adding smoke tests to our development workflow we got:

  • A simple way to verify any release of any project
  • Happier developers & stakeholders, even less worried about releases
  • Faster bug detection and quick reaction
  • Improved QA by creating tests effortless
smoke tests release verification smokex