In our old config management, we would indeed go ahead and parse configuration files and check values within the configuration files - even values entirely unre

In our old config management, we would indeed go ahead and parse configuration files and check values within the configuration files - even values entirely unrelated to the test at hand. Then you'd go ahead and change some default value in the config management because now you understand the system more and a whole bunch of unrelated tests would start failing. By now, we mostly do a quick syntax check of the config and the rest is usually handled by smoke-testing the application. The config files are usually only parsed if they contain some non-trivial degree of dynamic computation.