errichtest

Errichtest is a term used in software testing to describe a structured approach to evaluating how a system behaves when confronted with error conditions. The goal is to verify that software fails gracefully, maintains data integrity, logs meaningful information, and recovers to a safe state after faults.

The term is not tied to a single standardized methodology. In practice, errichtest refers to a family of test scenarios that exercise error paths, including invalid or unexpected inputs, downstream service failures, timeouts, resource exhaustion, and network disruptions.

Tests typically combine fault scenarios with assertions about outcomes, such as failure messages, fallback to cached data, retry logic, and graceful degradation. They often rely on mocks or stubs for isolated unit tests, fault-injection frameworks or controlled chaos in integration tests, and synthetic outages in end-to-end tests.

Implementation and scope: Errichtest is commonly integrated into continuous integration and delivery pipelines as part of resilience and reliability testing. It overlaps with negative testing, fault injection, and chaos engineering, but differs in that it is often described as a curated set of error scenarios rather than a formal standard.

Because usage varies by organization, many teams define their own objectives, scope, and success criteria when adopting errichtest.