what is a sanity check

A sanity check or sanity test is a basic test to quickly evaluate whether a claim or the result of a calculation can possibly be true. It is a simple check to see if the produced material is rational. The term "sanity check" is used in various fields, including programming, software engineering, humanities, and sciences. In programming, sanity checks may be used during development for debugging purposes and also to aid in troubleshooting software runtime errors. For example, in a bank account management application, a sanity check will fail if a withdrawal requests more money than the total account balance rather than allowing the account to go negative. In software testing, sanity testing is a type of software testing that aims to quickly evaluate whether the basic functionality of a new software build is working correctly or not. In the humanities, sanity checks are used to confirm that the ideas in a paper or discussion are sound and that they have a basis in provable material. In the sciences, people may bounce ideas off each other to ask for such a check, reflecting the fact that an idea which sounds totally reasonable inside someones head might turn out to be flawed after analysis by another person. The purpose of a sanity check is to quickly identify any major issues that would prevent the software from being used, rather than to uncover every possible error or bug in the system.