What are different characteristics of recovery testing?

Recovery testing itself makes clear what it is by through its name. We all know what recovery means. To recover means to return to the normal state after some failure or illness etc. This qualitative aspect is also present in today’s software system or applications.

- The recovery of a software system or application is defined as its ability to recover back form some hardware failure, crashes and similar such problems that are quite frequent with computers.
- Before the release of any software it needs to be tested for its recovery factor. This is done by recovery testing.
- Recovery testing can be defined as the testing of software system or application to determine its ability to recover fatal system crashed and hardware problems.

One should always keep one thing in mind which is that recovery testing is not to be confused with reliability testing since reliability testing aims at discovering the points at which the software system or application tends to fail.

- In a typical recovery testing, the system is forced to fail or crash or hang in order to check how the recovery asset of the software system or application is responding and how much strong it is.
- The software system or application is forced to fail in a variety of ways.
- Every attempt is made to discover the failure factors of the software system or application.

Objectives of Recovery Testing
- Apart from the recovery factor, the recovery testing also aims at determining the speed of recovery of the software system.
- It aims to check how fast the software system or application is able to recover from a failure or crash.
- It also aims to check how better the system recovers.
- It checks the quality of the recovered software system or application. There is some type and extent to which the software is recovered.
- The types and extent are mentioned in the documentation in the requirements and specifications section.
- Recovery testing is all about testing the recovering ability of the software system or application i.e., how well it recovers from the catastrophic problems, hardware failures and system crashes etc.

The following examples will further clarify the concept of recovery testing:

1. Keep the browser in runny mode and assign it multiple sessions. Then just restart your system. After the system has booted in, check whether the browser is able to recover all of the sessions that were running previously before the restart. If the browser is able to recover, then it is said to have good recovering ability.

2. Suddenly restart your computer while an application is in running mode. After the boot in session check whether the data which was being worked upon by the application is still integrate and valid or not? If the data is still valid, integrate and safe the application has a great deal of recovery factor.

3. Set some application like file downloader or similar to that on data receiving or downloading mode. Then just unplug the connecting cable. After a few minutes plug in the cable back and let the application resume its operation and check whether the application is still able to receive the data from the point where it was left. If its not able to resume the data receiving then its said to have a bad recovery factor.

Recovery testing tests the ability of application software to restart the operations that were running just before the loss of the integrity of the applications. The main objective of recovery testing is to ensure that the applications continue to run even after the failure of the system.

Recovery testing ensures the following:
- Data is stored in a preserved location.
- Previous recovery records are maintained.
- Development of a recovery tool which is available all the time.

Validation Phase - System Testing - Compatibility Testing and Recovery Testing

System testing concentrates on testing the complete system with a variety of techniques and methods. System testing comes after unit testing and Integration testing.

Compatibility Testing
This testing concentrates on testing whether the application performs well with third party tools, software or hardware platforms. For example, a website should run on different kind of web browsers. Similarly, an application that is developed on a particular platform should run well on other platforms as well. This is the main goal of compatibility testing.
Compatibility tests are also performed for various client/server based applications where the hardware changes from client to client. This testing is very crucial to organizations developing their own products. The products have to be checked for compliance with the competitors of the third party tools, hardware, or software platform.
A good way to ensure compatibility is to have a few resources assigned along with their routine tasks to keep updated about such compatibility issues and plan for testing when and if the need arises.

Recovery Testing
It is a system test that focuses the software to fall in a variety of ways and verifies that recovery is properly performed. If it is automatic recovery then re-initialization, check pointing mechanisms, data recovery and restart should be evaluated for correctness. If recovery requires human intervention, the mean time to repair (MTTR) is evaluated to determine whether it is within acceptable limits.

What is Recovery Testing and what are its features.

Recovery testing tells how well an application is able to recover from a crash, hardware failure. Recovery testing should not be confused with reliability testing, which tries to discover the specific point at which failure occurs.
- Recovery is ability to restart the operation after integrity of application is lost.
- The time taken to recover depends upon the number of restart points, volume of application, training and skill of people conducting recovery activities and the
tools available for recovery.
- Recovery testing ensures that the operations can be continued after a disaster.
- Recovery testing verifies recovery process and effectiveness of recovery process.
- In recovery testing, adequate back up data is preserved and kept in secure location.
- Recovery procedures are documented.
- Recovery personnel have been assigned and trained.
- Recovery tools have been developed and are available.

To use recovery testing, procedures, methods, tools and techniques are assessed to evaluate the adequacy. Recovery testing can be done by introducing a failure in the system and check whether the system is able to recover. A simulated disaster is usually performed on one aspect of application system. Recovery testing should be carried for one segment and then on the other segment when there are many failures.

Recovery testing is used when the continuity of the system is needed inorder for system to perform or function properly.User estimates the losses, time span to carry out recovery testing. Recovery testing is done by system analysts, testing professionals and management personnel.