Chaos Testing – It’s the New Trend in Testing

Thanks to Covid, the world is talking about vaccines. What do vaccines do for us? We were told we wouldn’t get sick. Instead, our body develops immunity against pathogenic microbes, which prevents us from being infected now or in the future.

This illustration has many similarities to chaos testing.

Computer systems have their own limitations and possible points of failure. If we could somehow inject variables into it that could cause it to crash, the team could identify the weaknesses in the system and the vulnerabilities that exist within it.

The necessary step-by-step solutions can be worked out. Most important are the protocols that will eventually allow computer systems to become more resilient and fault tolerant.

How is chaos testing different from normal testing?

Chaos testing differs from conventional testing in many ways.

• While chaotic testing affects many touchpoints that are beyond the control of the IT team, normal testing only considers touchpoints that are within the scope of the test.
• Normal testing usually occurs during the build/compile phase of a project, while chaotic testing occurs when the system is ready.
• Normal testing does not usually involve testing different configurations, behaviors, crashes, and other disturbances caused by third parties, unlike chaos testing
• Normal testing rarely addresses immediate solutions to negative end-user feedback.
• This forces disabled systems to wait for a fix to resume testing. Chaos testing, on the other hand, simply introduces problems into the system to see how it behaves.
• Normal testing found errors, then a hang may cause the system to hang. Chaos testing has a predefined abort plan that allows for errors where the answer is supposed to be wrong.

Chaos testing test pyramid

Chaos testing test pyramid is a testing strategy that breaks down testing into three levels: unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests. The idea is that most of the testing should occur at the unit level, with fewer tests at the integration level, and even fewer at the end-to-end level. This is because unit tests are faster, cheaper, and easier to maintain than integration or end-to-end tests.

Unit Testing

Unit testing helps us evaluate a specific behavior of a component or unit. However, it should be removed from all dependencies and tested as a standalone entity.

Integration testing

It focuses on the transactions between the different units and how they are connected to each other. Once the unit tests are successful, the engineers logically connect the units and launch their tests. This helps determine the stability of the integrated entity as a collective.

System Testing

System testing proactively assesses how an entire computer system performs under the added stress of a specific, worst-case failure scenario. It still runs under real conditions in the production environment.

Chaos Experiments

There must be a set of predefined benchmarks to perform chaos experiments on. Benchmarks will help to evaluate the results. Any unusual behavior should be traceable using these metrics.

If chaos testing begins to affect the system too much, negatively impacting customers, we need to have a rollback plan. IT teams must be ready to handle all complex situations and there must be a warning mechanism.

Here are some examples of system flags that may require a warning mechanism:

• CPU exhaustion
• Dependency failures
• Memory overload
• Network latency and failure
• Retry storms
• Race conditions
• Significant fluctuations in the input
• Failures in communication between services

Benefits of Chaos testing

Chaos testing offers the following benefits

• Five Nines of Availability

One of the most important benefits of chaos engineering is the very high availability of the system to end users. Five – No Availability indicates that the system has reached 99.999%. This means that system crashes are much less likely.

• Financial Profit

Even a very small disruption can cost a company millions of dollars. Companies are looking to boost revenue as chaos testing promises to keep systems running.

• Best disaster recovery plans in place

The goal of chaos testing is to prevent or at least reduce the frequency and severity of any system disasters. These teams are better equipped to deal with it and therefore have better plans. As more disasters are averted or corrected, plans improve.

• Coding efficiently

Since engineers know their code will be tested against chaos, they must write better code to ensure that the final system is as resilient as possible. They start to think outside the box and bring innovative ideas to life.

Also Read: Choosing The Right Automation Tool For Website Testing

Conclusion

Today’s world is changing rapidly and fast Internet technologies are in place. No organization is immune to system failure. The infrastructure is becoming more and more unstable. The system will crash. As the complexity of cloud-based technologies continues to grow and expand, these systems will fail more frequently and in different ways at the most inopportune times. Chaos testing helps organizations large and small run tests that simulate these vulnerabilities and attempt to replicate real problems when testing systems.

With the advent of modern tools, this new testing method is quickly becoming a very popular testing method to provide users with safe and reliable software.

When it comes to QA, nothing is better than having the correct people in charge. That’s why we make sure that everyone on our team is qualified and accredited on some of the industry’s best practices. 

At TestUnity we have an expert team of QA Engineers. This enables us to give our clients the support they require to make sure that their software hits the market in the right circumstances. Contact us for a free consultation and see why TestUnity’s QA approach is the best choice for your software.

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