Perhaps I'm missing the point, but I'd be wary of advocating pure automation as a replacement for a good old-fashioned manual eyeballing. The point of a smoke

Perhaps I'm missing the point, but I'd be wary of advocating pure automation as a replacement for a good old-fashioned manual eyeballing. The point of a smoke test is that for all your care in testing and deployment, you still might have missed something. Stuff goes wrong, and not always in an immediately machine testable way. You don't need a full QA department, you just need to open up the bits you've changed after a deploy and have a play to make sure nothing's obviously out of place. It's a small step to make a non-optional part of your process and it has a potentially huge payoff. Adding the automated integration test is a great thing to do, but complementing it with a human is even better.