Recovery Testing
Recovery testing verifies that a system can recover gracefully from a failure — a crash, a lost network connection, a hardware fault, a database outage — and return to normal operation without data loss or corruption. It deliberately induces failure to observe how the system responds.
Typical recovery tests: kill the database connection mid-transaction and confirm no partial writes persist, force-close the app during a save operation and confirm data integrity on relaunch, or simulate a server crash and measure how quickly and cleanly the system comes back online.
Recovery testing overlaps with chaos engineering, which takes the same idea further by deliberately injecting failures into production-like systems on an ongoing basis, rather than as a one-off pre-release check — treating resilience as something to continuously verify, not just test once.
