Now a day, organisations are very much concerned about reliability due to rise of microservices and cloud architecture. For ensuring reliability, finding, and fixing any issues well in advance before the system goes live is very crucial. In addition, with that deliberately trying to fail the system by thoughtfully thinking about different failure or chaotic scenarios are important. This planned failure scenarios are useful as they can arise any time in near future. Trying to concisely fail the system by executing those chaotic scenarios and observe the system closely to identify the potential reason for any errors and then fix those errors before it affects the real user. Whole objective is to make a flexible or resilient and faithful or reliable system to gain the customer confidence and do the business in long run.
In this blog, I will talk about why finding, fixing from failure is required for flexible, faithful system to endure in the market.
Reliability (Faithfulness) – why so important
Reliability is nothing but the probability of failure-free software operation for a specified period in a specified environment. Reliability is priority for organizations as it enhanced customer experience which in turn create faithfulness and confidence. Consequences of that organisation creates their own brand identity and can-do business for long period.
Reliability Testing- for ensuring faithfulness
Reliability testing is a continuous process that needs to be started from requirement gathering and should continue even post deployment. Continuously test the system to find and fix any issues/errors/defects related to both functional and non-functional and resolve them before it goes to production. This is also highly cost-effective. In a nutshell, continuous reliability testing assists to create a faithful system and better end-user experience.
Resilience (Flexible) Testing- for ensuring flexibility
Resilience is recovering quickly from the sudden difficulties. In resilience testing, both system’s ability to handle under extreme conditions and how quickly system can bounce back to its normal state and how gracefully system can recover from failure are observed thoroughly.
Finding, Fixing from Failure- typical testing process
Finding and fixing from failure with carefully monitoring the system is a typical functional and non-functional testing process. Testing team continuously doing this for ensuring overall system reliability. Finding the potential issues by continuous testing and continuous monitoring the system, followed by fixing those issues and later re-executing to confirm before live is a typical testing process that every organisations are following.
Finding, Fixing from Failure-in addition with Chaotic Testing
The only missing thing from typical functional and non-functional testing would be failure scenarios for trying to break the system. Proactively testing with different failure or chaotic scenarios which can arise at any time and carefully observing every component of the system, add lot of values to build the right system. Finding from this chaotic testing, analysing, and fixing issues, if any, creates reliable and resilient system. Repeatedly doing this assists system to handle unexpected real-life events easily. Identifying chaotic scenarios are critical and can be finalised as a whole team after several rounds of discussion based on system architecture, interfaces, dependencies etc. Examples will be resource exhaustion like CPU or memory or Disk, node shutdown, network latency, DNS failure etc. Continuous chaotic testing provides confidence for turbulent and surprised situations.
Typical non-functional testing also consists of some of these chaotic or worst-case scenarios. However, due to rapid growth of microservices and cloud architectures, more detailed chaotic testing become necessary now. Finding, and fixing from those failures help to build a flexible and faithful system. More significantly, this chaotic testing is also conducted on production with more controlled and effective way for better resilient and reliable system with increased availability.
Conclusion
Organisations always want flexible and faithful system for doing business continuously by creating brand identity. This can be possible by conducting different types of typical functional and non-functional testing including chaos or failure testing and then observe closely on test results and statistics captured by monitoring or observability platforms. Then, if any potential issue found, fix them at the earliest and re-execute the test to confirm before live. Indeed, finding, fixing from failure is very important for achieving flexible, faithful system.
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