Chaos Engineering Is Exploratory Software Testing

12/15/20181 Min Read — In Conferences, Ops, Testing

This last week I went to the 2018 Linux-CloudNative-Kubernetes Conference in Seattle. I attended two talks on Chaos Engineering. What struck me was that there was a repeated refrain about how it wasn't testing because you don't know the expected results. It was an exploration and therefore not a test.

Recounting this to other testers and they did not internalize it the way I did, as the utter failure of test/QA as a profession. Reasonable testers deemed it unfortunate that these folks had never heard of exploratory testing before and likened it to blaming the scientists for some people thinking the earth was flat. I get it, but I don't think the same thinking and action is going to do us any good.

It feels like we've been doing nothing we've gotten nowhere. Test/QA has gotten left behind at the person/role level. It's advanced past the current average skill level, as far as I can tell. The same way it's socially unacceptable for a sysadmin not to be able to write code these days. Testers not being able to step up and own things like Chaos Engineering strikes me as the end of the line.

So what am I going to do about it? I'm going to keep attending dev conferences, write more code, and doing DevOps and see if any of my test peers show up.