Smoke tests are used to find out if your build is stable enough to be tested exhaustively in a proper environment. Does your software start and keeps running? Is the web server and all remaining services up as expected? If it does reach the minimums, then it can’t be further tested, and development needs to look at immediately.Smoke tests should be the ones you or the machine will perform for you. Having a good set of smoke tests can evaluate the stability of it. As more you may find in the advance about the stability of the SUT, better, as it will avoid unnecessary works afterwards. If smoke tests passed, then you can perform sanity tests and all the regression tests (start with the automated "ones” - i.e. automated scripts/checks). Probably you have to decide which regression tests to perform…and here comes risk assessment: if you have to choose, start with by addressing the higher risks in the context of your build/release.