Application Resiliency Testing

August 22, 2016

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Resilience

It is the capability of regaining the original or former state after going through changes or to recover quickly after going through the difficulties.

What is Application Resiliency?

A software application is said to be resilient, if it possesses the quality of getting restore to its original version or state, after going through certain non-favourable conditions or circumstances, such as disaster, crash, system down, failure, power-cut, natural calamities, etc.

What's the need for an application to be resilient?

With the increase in the complexity of the process of multiple types, along with the need of continuously implementing the software application, across multiple platforms and levels, the probability for a system or an application, moves closer to the 1. The resilience attribute ensures the quality of the application, to function uninterruptedly, even after its one or more than one functionality or modules or components, goes into failure state.

So, what is application resiliency testing?

Application resiliency testing is used to verify and validate the non-functional attribute, particularly the recovery and reliability trait of a software application, to meet the unexpected or undesired events, without getting down. It may be seen as a type of business continuity plan, to ensure the interrupt-free working of the application, and measures its ability to recover, without incurring any loss to data, features or functionalities, after getting encountered with any sort of expected or unexpected circumstances.

Below given, are some of the features or improvements, introduced by the CISCO, to enhance the effectiveness of the resiliency testing.

• No Production downtime:It simply means that resiliency testing product, does not affect the production environment or the process, which is being executed, simultaneously.
• Large group testing: Previously, Cisco is used to test each application, individually or in the small sets, which was less efficient, due to various reasons, such as non-availability of testing team during each application testing, no reduction in the amount of efforts and time required to test these application, individually, comparing to testing them consolidated or in large batches. Therefore, they opt to test application in the batches of large size.
• Designated Resiliency primes: A personnel, namely 'prime' is deployed, to acts as a bridge between the application team and the testing team, and helps in planning the resilient testing process. Resiliency prime are accountable for speeding up the process of resilient testing, by getting involving them in various tasks, such as requirement gathering, identifying the testing scope, and many such things.
• Streamlined Process: Processes are group together, and are being automated, to execute in a sequential manner.