docs: add tester quick-start smoke test guide

[adityamparikh]

What

Adds dev-docs/SMOKE_TEST.md — a fast, copy-paste end-to-end smoke test for verifying a solr-mcp release JAR works across the three common MCP clients (Claude Code, Claude Desktop, MCP Inspector).

Why

There's currently no single tester-facing checklist for confirming a release candidate (or a fresh local build) actually serves tools over stdio. This gives release verifiers a self-contained script with expected outputs at each step, so a broken JAR is obvious without a separate "expected results" reference.

What's in it

• Client registration for all three clients (claude mcp add, claude_desktop_config.json, npx @modelcontextprotocol/inspector) — same java -jar + SOLR_URL recipe for each.
• A list-collections sanity check as the first smoke signal.
• A full build-and-query walkthrough (create-collection → add-fields → index-json-documents → get-collection-stats → search) against a self-contained 61-document demo collection, with expected-output checkpoints (61 of 61 indexed, numDocs: 61, 20 hits).
• Appendices with the schema, the 61-doc dataset (nulls pre-stripped so pint fields don't reject them), and seven sample search queries plus their natural-language equivalents.

Placed in dev-docs/ alongside the existing contributor/release-verification guides (e.g. ATR_TESTING_GUIDE.md).

Docs-only change — no source or build files touched.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[epugh]

Thanks for this, I will be able tot eat this tomorrow

[adityamparikh]

@epugh any feedback?

[epugh]

@adityamparikh I revamped the document to get down to just the essence... I wanted to simplify this so folks can more quickly consume the content. Thoughts?

@janhoy --> This was inspired by, I think, your comment about the release email.

[janhoy]

Thanks. This gives devs clear instructions on how to validate, not only that correct jars are produced, but that it also works for basic use case.

Perhaps later we are able to also include a simple smoke-mcp.py script that will perform all steps for you, using MCP-Inspector's --cli option to script some MCP tool calls.

[janhoy]

Fiddled with the tool mcp-assert (https://github.com/blackwell-systems/mcp-assert) and these commands will assert the list-collections tool:

JAR="./build/libs/solr-mcp-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar"
export SOLR_URL="http://localhost:8983/solr/"

mkdir -p "evals"

cat > "evals/list-collections.yaml" <<YAML
name: list-collections returns the two seeded collections
server:
  command: "java"
  args: ["-jar", "$JAR"]
assert:
  tool: list-collections
  args: {}
  expect:
    not_error: true
    not_empty: true
    contains: ["books", "films"]
    not_contains: ["nonexistent"]
    min_results: 2
timeout: 30s
YAML

npx -y @blackwell-systems/mcp-assert run --suite "$REPO/evals/"

The tool can also do an automated "audit", listing tools and checking that they are ok (read only)

npx -y @blackwell-systems/mcp-assert audit --server "java -jar ./build/libs/solr-mcp-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar"