3.5Stage 4: Post-Deploy (Continuous)

After deployment, testing does not stop. Post-deploy checks verify that the application works in the actual production environment.

What runs here:

• Smoke tests against the deployed environment (critical user flows)
• Synthetic monitoring (scheduled tests that simulate user behavior)
• Canary analysis (comparing error rates between old and new versions)
• Health check endpoints

# Example: Post-deploy smoke tests
smoke-tests:
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
      with:
        node-version: 24
        cache: 'npm'
    - run: npm ci
    - run: npx playwright install --with-deps chromium
    - run: npx playwright test --project=smoke
      env:
        BASE_URL: https://production.example.com
    - name: Notify on failure
      if: failure()
      run: |
        curl -X POST ${{ secrets.SLACK_WEBHOOK }} \
          -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
          -d '{"text":"Production smoke tests failed after deploy!"}'