Quality Characteristics for Technical Testing - Reliability Testing

6 important questions on Quality Characteristics for Technical Testing - Reliability Testing


An objective of reliability testing is to monitor a statistical measure of software maturity over time and compare this to a desired reliability goal. Name such a goal.

Service Level Agrement (SLA) in the form of a Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) or Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) or other form of failure intensity measurement which may be used as exit criteria.

What is fault tolerance testing?

Testing the system's tolerance to faults which occur externally to the application under test; which are typically reported by the operating system.

Name examples of fault tolerance errors?

Disk full, process or service not available, file not found, memory not available.
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What are purposes of availaility testing?

  • To establish whether required system components and processes are available (on demand or continuously) and respond as expected to requests
  • To provide measurements from which an overall level of availability can be obtained (often given as a percentage of time in a SLA).
  • To establish whether an overall system is ready for operation (e.g., as one of the criteria for operational acceptance testing).

When is availability testing performed and when is it particularly relevant?

Before and after entering operational service.
It is particularly relevant for the following situations:
  • Where systems are made up of other systems (i.e., systems of systems). Tests focus on the availability of all individual component systems.
  • Where a system or service is sourced externally (e.g., from a third party supplier). Tests focus on measuring availability levels to ensure that agreed service levels are upheld.

What can you tell about reliability test specification?


  • Reliability testing may take the form of a repeated set of predetermined tests. These may be tests selected at random from a pool or test cases generated by a statistical model using random or pseudo-random methods.
  • Where reliability tests are scheduled to run automatically in parallel to normal operations (e.g., to test availability), they are generally specified to be as simple as possible to avoid possible negative impact on the system performance efficiency.
  • Certain reliability tests may specify that memory-intensive actions be executed repeatedly so that possible memory leaks can be detected.

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