we frequently deploy newer releases to QA. Before making a release, we do a "smoke test" where one of us runs through the major functional areas of the application. Sometimes we encounter bugs at this stage. The development web server is Jetty, but all deployments from QA upwards happen on Tomcat - minor incompatibilities between Jetty and Tomcat are identified very late, usually when the smoke test is run right after a deployment.

I devised a mechanism to run a automated smoke test, and I will describe the process here.

Author: Binil Thomas
Published: December 8, 2006