Chaos Testing for Quality Software Applications

In practical life, it is rare to find perfect software applications. Chances to release 100% bug-free applications is impossible. Applications fail, glitches happen and cyber-attacks occur. This can have serious consequences for businesses in the form of dissatisfied customers due to the unavailability of the required application and a long downtime duration. This causes harm to business reputation and results in huge losses. So the underlying question remains if businesses can develop and deploy software applications that never face any problems? Well, a practical answer to this question may be no. But it is fairly possible to minimize the impact of such by taking some measures that can protect the software with the help of chaos testing. Companies offer software testing services that ensure quality software releases. 

Why Chaos Testing?

The idea of chaos testing revolves around the principles of chaos engineering, that describe this practise and a discipling of experimenting on a distributed system to ensure confidence about a system’s capacity to perform under turbulent conditions in production. It also involves the introduction of failures and issues into a software application in order to measure the system’s ability to handle the impact of the failure on the app’s durability. Chaos engineering was first introduced by Netflx - America’s number one media services provider and production company. It was performed to test how resilient its IT infrastructure was to ensure a seamless customer experience. Chaos testing is all about entering into data centers, to check all the servers that host critical functions of an application’s online activities. The testers randomly pulls the cables, destroys devices, etc. The IT managers face a huge challenge as they are responsible to design the IT system in such a manner that even when testers try to get into the system, they fail to destroy it. 

Uncover Vulnerabilities to Avoid Problems Later 

Although this process may sound negative, however, it is a good tool to prepare a system against any potential issues or problems. Instead of waiting for an issue to appear, companies should hire software testing services to take a proactive approach with their software products. Companies can gain more control over the issues appearing in their apps. This helps them in identifying hidden defects, vulnerabilities, and other issues, which may never reveal on their own, despite conducting traditional software testing. The presence of such issues in an application may prove disastrous in the long run, if left unattended. 

MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery) vs. MTTF (Mean Time To Failure)

Organizations believe that it is an ideal situation to have the longest time that their software application faces any outage or technical issue. This means that they focus on MTTF, which refers to the average time for which a system operates before it fails. However, the reality is that the customers will only remember the time when an application doesn’t work perfectly fine. Thus, it is really important that organziations shift them focus their time from MTTF to MTTR. on the contrary, the mean time to recovery (MTTR) refers to the average time that an application takes to recover from a failure or problem. The main objective for organizations should be to focus on minimizing the MTTR so that customer do not even notice when a glitch occurs. This is only possible by utilizing the chaos testing. 

Chaos Testing in the DevOps Model 

It is really important to clearly understand here, that systematically entering an error into an application in no way means to affect the customers. Whatever experiments the chaos testing involves, it should still allow a well-fucntioning application for its end-users. This is in no way feasible to perform with the legacy software development and testing processes. Chaos engineering works well in a DevOps environment, where test automation is an integral part of the entire process. It involves a continuous monitoring and feedback process, while there is always a scope for continuous improvement. When testers inject an error into the system, there will be a lot of bugs that will be revealed and vulnerabilities as well. DevOps will help testers to resolve the issues in the real-time and automation can be deployed for future occurrences.  

Conclusion 

When chaos testing is combined with DevOps, it ensure that organizations would be developing and delierving the highest quality software applications. When they hire software testing services, they can ensure standardize efforts, ascertain resilient software apps and ensure accelerated time-to-market with the help of DevOps testing solutions. They focus on delivering improved quality and greater efficiency.