Idioms & SlangBeginner
Sanity check
PronunciationSAN-i-tee chek
Definition
A quick, informal test to ensure that a piece of code, a configuration, or a logic flow is fundamentally reasonable before doing deeper work.
Where you hear it
In code reviews, testing discussions, and daily standups.
Examples
Let us do a quick sanity check on the numbers before pushing this update to production.
I ran a sanity check on the API response to make sure the data format looks correct.
Common mistake
Treating a sanity check as a complete, rigorous test suite rather than a fast, surface-level verification.