API smoke check

An API smoke check calls the endpoints a journey depends on and asserts what a user would care about: the order is created, the status is right, the total matches. It runs in seconds and tells you whether the build is alive before anyone opens the interface.

Functional testers should own a small set of these, tied to journeys and not to endpoint coverage. I keep them in Bruno or Postman next to the project, and I use an AI assistant to draft the collection. The expected results come from the acceptance criteria and from me, never from the assistant.

For asynchronous systems the check has to wait: trigger the event, then poll for the outcome the user would see, with a deadline agreed with Product.