Smoke Testing

In plumbing, a smoke test forces actual smoke through newly plumbed pipes to find leaks, before water is allowed to flow through the pipes (wiki).

In software testing, smoke testing is a preliminary to further testing, which should reveal simple failures severe enough to reject a prospective software release. In this case, the smoke is metaphorical (wiki).

Example of Smoke Test as Pre-release Testing:
Mozilla.org performs a daily build, and runs adaily minimal “smoke test” on the build for several major platforms, in order to ensure the build is sufficiently stable to allow development work on it to proceed. If the build fails, “people get hassled until they fix the bits they brokes." If the smoke test identifies bugs, they are posted daily so that developers are aware of any serious problems in the build.
(Source: Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development)