System shutdowns

Which parts of your system are single points of failure, and whose removal will disrupt the service? Like failover testing, for these services, you can mimic crashes, hardware failure, loss of power, or cloud computing services being down – anything that makes a subsystem unavailable for a prolonged period. Examine your system architecture again to identify all the possibilities so that you can work through them systematically.

Testing during a shutdown is often complicated due to the exact behavior not being specified. In some organizations, it is difficult to carefully define the behavior of a fully working system, let alone cover the different failure modes. Work with the developers and product owners to determine the performance in these situations.

In addition to single points of failure, you can trigger multiple outages or major outages – rather than simulating losing one switch, for instance, what happens if the entire site or cloud service...