Sanity Testing

Sanity Testing is a quick, focused type of software testing that is performed after a minor change or bug fix has been implemented. Its purpose is to verify that the change is working correctly and, more importantly, that it hasn't introduced any new, unexpected problems. Think of it as a brief "health check" to ensure the system is still stable enough for more thorough, detailed testing. It is a subset of regression testing, but it is more limited in scope and performed more quickly.

Example: A developer fixes a bug on a website's login page that was causing an error message to display incorrectly. After the fix is deployed to the test environment, a tester would perform sanity testing. They wouldn't run the entire suite of login tests. Instead, they would quickly perform these two checks:

Verify that the error message now displays correctly.

1. Perform a simple, successful login to ensure the fix didn't break the basic login functionality.
2. If both of these quick tests pass, the tester can confidently move on to more comprehensive testing.