“Perfect” motivates us to build things with great precision; yet, in order to go from accuracy to perfection, we need a good strategy, a strong mentality, and the ability to develop and learn from our mistakes. Almost all of us know that bugs exist throughout and after product development, impacting product quality and resulting in breaches and cyber-attacks, creating questions about the brand’s trustworthiness. However, one question remains: can bug-free software be created?
This isn’t the case at all. As engineering teams strive to create large-scale software apps and distributed services that run on cloud infrastructure, it’s becoming more important than ever for software services to be fault-tolerant. This also demonstrates that professional DevOps testing service providers are focused on increasing 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 metrics 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.
Chaos Testing and DevOps: The Perfect Blend
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.
Chaos Tests are an effective method for evaluating software robustness, but they may be dangerous if used carelessly in an unprepared environment. We should constantly be aware of the possible consequences and make sure that they are kept to a minimum so that the client’s experience is not harmed!
