Chaos Engineering
// Definition
Deliberately injecting failures (killing instances, adding latency, dropping packets) into production or production-like environments to verify resilience. Pioneered by Netflix's Chaos Monkey. Uncovers brittleness that synthetic tests can't reproduce.
// Related terms
Shift-Right
Validating quality in production — through monitoring, feature flags, canary releases, and chaos experiments — to catch issues that synthetic tests can't reproduce.
Stress Testing
Pushing the system beyond its limits to find the breaking point and observe failure modes. Asks: where does this fall over, and how does it recover?
Soak Testing
Running the system at expected load for a prolonged period (hours to days) to surface memory leaks, connection exhaustion, and slow degradation that short tests miss.
Learn more · Non-Functional Testing Overview
Chapter 6 · Lesson 1: Reliability and Stability Testing