Testing & Quality Assurance Flashcards

What is the goal of chaos engineering in a DevOps quality assurance strategy?

Answer: To proactively inject failures to identify weaknesses in system resilience before they cause outages

Chaos engineering deliberately introduces failures (network latency, pod kills, disk failures) in controlled conditions to discover weaknesses before they manifest as real incidents.

Which type of testing evaluates how a system performs under expected and peak load conditions?

Answer: Load and performance testing

Load and performance testing simulates concurrent users and traffic spikes to ensure the system meets response time and throughput requirements under real-world conditions.

What is a 'test double' in the context of unit testing?

Answer: A generic term for objects that stand in for real dependencies (mocks, stubs, fakes) during testing

Test doubles are substitutes for real dependencies—mocks, stubs, spies, and fakes—used to isolate the unit under test from external systems.

In DevOps, what does 'test automation debt' refer to?

Answer: The accumulated backlog of manual tests that have not yet been automated, increasing regression risk over time

Test automation debt refers to the growing gap between manual test cases and automated coverage, which increases the time and risk associated with each release.

Which approach best describes 'continuous testing' in a DevOps pipeline?

Answer: Executing automated tests at every stage of the pipeline to provide immediate feedback

Continuous testing means automated tests run at every pipeline trigger—on commit, build, and deployment—so teams receive immediate quality feedback without manual intervention.

What is the primary risk of having a high percentage of end-to-end tests and few unit tests (an inverted testing pyramid)?

Answer: Slow, brittle, and expensive test suites that delay pipeline feedback

An inverted pyramid (ice cream cone anti-pattern) results in slow test runs, frequent flaky failures, and high maintenance costs because E2E tests are fragile and resource-intensive.

Which DevOps practice involves running two identical production environments and switching traffic between them to enable zero-downtime deployments with automated testing validation?

Answer: Blue-green deployment

Blue-green deployment maintains two identical environments; after deploying and testing the new version in the 'green' environment, traffic is switched from 'blue' to 'green' for zero downtime.