Continually testing our product with smoke tests

The author discusses how their team's reliability was a top priority when releasing `On-call`, a new notification system, as they wanted to ensure it could handle pressure from customers with high expectations. To achieve this, the team introduced a library of Smoke Tests that continually test core journeys of the product in production and staging environments, running every minute. These tests exercise the infrastructure and third-party integrations, alerting the team if any fail consistently. The team also runs these tests on every change to the application, both when pull requests are raised and as the merged change is deployed. This approach allows them to make changes without breaking things. The author shares learnings from building their Smoke Test framework, such as starting with a clean slate, using standard Rails, testing user assumptions, preparing for unexpected issues, and adopting a cultural mindset of continuous improvement.