Tests or gateways during build and release process

Question

As part of my automated build and release process, I run some tests/gateways/checks. These are some examples:

• Pre-build checks:

  • The version we are building has not been already released
  • The tag for the version we are building does not exist in version control
  • ...

• Post-build checks

  • The binary actually runs (maybe this can be considered smoke test?)
  • ...

• Pre-promotion checks

  • The version we are building has not been already released
  • The tag for the version we are building does not exist in version control
  • The version we are promoting exists in JIRA
  • Coverity or Sonar analysis meet certain quality thresholds
  • ...

You can probably extend this list to pre-deploy, post-deploy (these will be smoke tests, as I understand)

My question is, what is the correct name for this checks/tests?

Any pointers to articles about this kind of stuff would be helpful. Tried googling, but it's a bit difficult without knowing the correct name for the term, hence the question here ;)

Answer 1

If we stick to the Continuous deployment pipeline's Quality gates this is a picture that can make it a bit easier to understand, why we need such:

And to be more specific about the build pipeline:

As you can see moving from lower to Prod environment different kind of test levels and types are included depending from the needs. The manual phase means that is done with more focus from the QA team, not doing performance testing at hand.

The binary actually runs (maybe this can be considered smoke test?)

Not correct.

When your binary is set, deployed and build on every environment you want to get a fast feedback (in range of 10 mins) how the functionality is set up(configs) and running. Having a good Smoke suite will give you the confidence that everything went well, so you can proceed with the rest of the expensive testing and automation jobs. It's also known as intake testing, when subset of test cases that cover the most important functionality is selected and run, to ascertain if crucial functions of a program correctly work. The main advantage it gives when used, is to determine if this binary should be subjected to further, more fine-grained testing.

My question is, what is the correct name for this checks/tests?

As you can see the quality process is a bit complex (activity) to put it in a simple word. A single blog post or an answer here can just scratch the surface. There are a couple of books too.

You can continue reading about it here and here.

Bottom-line: Your passed tests should be gateways when promoting towards Prod.