Testing timeouts
One crucial failure when communicating with any remote system, whether internal or external to your application, is not receiving any response. That lack of response could be due to network issues, a problem with the destination system, or the message being invalid. Whatever the reason, there is a new set of failure modes to look for in this case related to timeouts and retries:
- The presence of timeouts on all messages
- Appropriate timeout lengths
- The use of heartbeat messages
- Retries for failed messages
At the most basic level, you have to check that a reasonable timeout is in place. If we pick a simple example with a client sending a message to a server, we need to make sure that the client notices the lack of response and reacts to it. There are cases where clients will enter the state of waiting for an answer forever. That is the first class of bugs you can raise.
Next, is inappropriate timeouts. You may need to discuss these with product...
