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Chaos engineering

in software engineering, experimenting with the product to test extreme situations

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 15, 2026
Entity authorityQ42531584
Source-derived summary

Chaos engineering is the discipline of experimenting on a system in order to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

Concept

In software development, the ability of a given software to tolerate failures while still ensuring adequate quality of service—often termed resilience—is typically specified as a requirement. However, development teams may fail to meet this requirement due to factors such as short deadlines or lack of domain knowledge. Chaos engineering encompasses techniques aimed at meeting resilience requirements.

Chaos engineering can be used to achieve resilience against infrastructure failures, network failures, and application failures; the latter includes resilience to unhandled exceptions.

Operational readiness using chaos engineering

Calculating how much confidence we have in the interconnected complex systems that are put into production environments requires operational readiness metrics. Operational readiness can be evaluated using chaos engineering simulations. Solutions for increasing the resilience and operational readiness of a platform include strengthening the backup, restore, network file transfer, failover capabilities and overall security of the environment.

An evaluation to induce chaos in a Kubernetes environment terminated random pods receiving data from edge devices in data centers while processing analytics on a big data network. The pods' recovery time was a resiliency metric that estimated the response time.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Chaos engineering” is in software engineering, experimenting with the product to test extreme situations. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Chaos, engineering and software, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewUseful for establishing the present vocabulary of the subject while preserving a route back to the evidence on which that vocabulary rests. The current 208-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Chaos, engineering and software is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “in software engineering, experimenting with the product to test extreme situations” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q42531584. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.

Critical limits

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Chaos engineering” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.