Most small agencies don’t have a tester. Developers check their own work, and the project manager clicks through the site the evening before handover. It mostly works, until the client finds a bug during the demo.
You don’t need a QA department to avoid that. You need a short, repeatable smoke test that someone runs before every handover, the same way every time.
The rules
- Someone who didn’t build it runs it. The developer knows where not to click. A designer, a PM or another developer doesn’t.
- Same list every time. A written checklist beats memory, especially at 6 pm on a Thursday.
- Thirty minutes, not three hours. A smoke test checks that nothing is on fire. Its job is to decide whether the site is ready to hand over, not to find every bug.
The 30-minute checklist
Minutes 0–10: the main journeys
- Complete the two or three things the client’s visitors must be able to do: enquire, book, buy, sign up.
- Check the confirmation email arrives, in the right inbox, with the right sender.
- Open the main menu and every top-level page. Nothing blank, nothing broken.
Minutes 10–20: a real phone
- Repeat the most important journey on your own phone, not in a resized browser.
- Open the menu, fill in a form with the phone keyboard, dismiss the cookie banner.
- Look for anything covering a button, and anything you have to scroll sideways to see.
Minutes 20–30: the embarrassing stuff
- Placeholder text, test products, “lorem ipsum”, staging URLs in links.
- Submit a form empty and with a wrong email. Are the errors sensible?
- The favicon, page titles, and the privacy notice link in the footer.
- A made-up URL: is there a proper 404 page?
Write the results down
Two lines are enough: what was checked, on which devices, and anything left open. It protects the team (“we tested checkout on iPhone and Chrome, not on Firefox”) and makes the next handover faster.
When a smoke test isn’t enough
A smoke test catches the obvious. It won’t catch the double-charged payment, the discount code that works twice, or the user role that can see another customer’s data. For launches, redesigns, migrations, shops and anything with accounts or roles, a structured test by a tester is worth it. It usually costs less than one round of client bug reports, re-fixes and re-deploys.
That’s why agencies bring in a tester by the hour rather than hiring one: testing when a project needs it, nothing when it doesn’t.
Frequently asked questions.
What is a smoke test?
A short, shallow test of the most important functions, run to decide whether a build is stable enough to hand over or to test in more depth. It checks that nothing is on fire, not that everything is perfect.
Who should run the smoke test in an agency?
Ideally someone who didn’t build the feature: another developer, a designer or the project manager. Fresh eyes use the site differently from the person who wrote it.
When is a smoke test not enough?
For launches, redesigns, migrations, checkouts, payments and anything with user accounts or roles. There, a structured test by a tester usually pays for itself in avoided client bug reports.
