How Chaos Testing is Building Resilient Software Apps?

“Perfect”- This word inspires us to construct anything with high accuracy; nevertheless, in order to progress from precision to perfection, we must have a correct plan, strong resolve, and the capacity to grow and learn from failure. We all know that bugs persist throughout and after product development, affecting product quality and resulting in failures and cyber-attacks, raising doubts about the brand and its trustworthiness. But one issue remains: is it possible to create software that is bug-free?

This is certainly not the case. As engineering teams work to develop large-scale software apps and distributed services that operate on cloud infrastructure, it is becoming increasingly critical that software services be robust to failures. Furthermore, this also highlights that providers of competent DevOps testing services are focused on improving operational efficiency in terms of deployment quality.

To develop software that can quickly recover from failures, we considered employing Chaos Testing into our Software development and testing process to ensure that our services can withstand turbulence without compromising our clients’ SLAs. The practice is defined as the “discipline of testing on a distributed system to establish confidence in the system’s potential to endure turbulent conditions in production,” according to “Principles of Chaos Engineering.”

Non-functional software testing includes compliance, endurance, load, and recovery testing, among other things, and chaos testing is one of them. Let’s look at how Chaos testing can aid in the detection of problems.

Steps to Perform Chaos Testing

1. Application and Test Environment

The chaos testing process begins by selecting the application on which the test will be conducted and setting up the right test environment.

2. Selecting the Matrics

Developers have to select which matrics to measure to reflect the software’s performance. Throughput, input and output rates, latency, connections between metrics, and recovery time could be included.

3. Determining the Benchmark for Performance

A benchmark is identified and established for the maximum load that the software can take without causing performance concerns. This can be used to compare metrics during testing and helps differentiate what the usual deviation for performance is.

4. Crash the System

This is an essential part of the process because system failures are usually unplanned. Interrupting communication with external dependencies, introducing malicious input, altering traffic control, restricting bandwidth, shutting down connecting systems, removing data sources, and consuming system resources are all techniques to crash the system. Next, measurement of metrics is done and following the completion of these scenarios, metrics should be recorded and plotted to show how each scenario influenced performance.

5. Taking Action and Fixing Flaws

This is the final step where results are discussed among the team and a bug fixing task is initiated. These findings are then used for better future testing scenarios by teams.

Significance of Chaos Testing

Chaotic testing is basically the capacity to induce failures in your production system on a regular basis, but at random. This procedure is used to assess the systems’ and environment’s robustness as well as determine the MTTR. Adopting chaotic testing prevents complacency. You can get creative and cause targeted yet unpredictable failures, such as lowering system performance, killing off a microservice, or shutting down access to a portion of the network.

The goal for worldwide organizations should be to reduce Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) to the point where customers are unaware that an issue has occurred. Chaos testing can help with this. This chaos testing that we employ enabled the resilience of our services to be improved by identifying faults early in the development cycle, before deployment into production.

Perfect Blend of Chaos Testing and DevOps Works Best

In Waterfall, Lean, or any other model, the resiliency of software cannot be tested through chaos testing. For this purpose, DevOps setup proves to be a perfect medium because the end-to-end Software development cycle is supported by DevOps Automation. DevOps ensures continuous enhancement as constant tracking and feedback loop is formed. When a defect is inserted into a software, many vulnerabilities are detected and recognized These faults can be fixed in real-time with the aid of a DevOps methodology and for future events, automation can be introduced.

So it is really important to test the resilience of the product when the DevOps setup is in place.

Wrapping Up

Chaos Tests are a strong approach for assessing software resilience, but by nature, if they’re recklessly utilized in an unprepared setting, they may have serious effects. We should always be aware of the potential implications and ensure that the effects are limited so that the client’s experience doesn’t get affect.

ImpactQA, a leading software testing provider ensures to follow the DevOps best practices and hence always deliver resilient software solutions with seamless user experience. Our DevOps testing experts religiously employ the current CI/CD tools to deliver transformative and robust solutions.