Smoke testing
Also called: smoke test, build verification test, smoke check
Smoke testing is a short set of checks that tells you whether a build is worth testing further, or worth handing to anyone else.
A smoke test is a handful of checks run on every candidate build: can a user sign in, reach the main journeys and complete the most important one. It takes minutes, and a failure means the build goes back before anyone spends an afternoon on it.
Smoke tests are gates. I run one before a build is handed to stakeholders for UAT, because a session where business owners discover that login is broken costs trust that takes weeks to rebuild.
A smoke suite stays useful only while it stays small. When it grows into a slow regression pack, people stop running it on every build, and it no longer does its job.