Smoke tests or build acceptance tests constitute a special family of tests that are traditionally used as early sanity checks by QA teams.
The use of the word smoke alludes to the old adage that wherever there is smoke, there is also fire. These checks are explicitly designed to identify early warning signals that something is wrong. It goes without saying that any issue uncovered by a smoke test is treated by the QA team as a show-stopper; if smoke tests fail, no further testing is performed. The QA team reports its findings to the development team and waits for a revised release candidate to be submitted for testing.
Once the smoke tests successfully pass, the QA team proceeds to run their suite of functional tests before giving the green light for release. The following diagram summarizes the process of running smoke tests for QA purposes:
