foutscenario

Foutscenario is a term used in Dutch-language engineering and information technology to describe a hypothetical fault or failure scenario used to assess a system's resilience. It refers to a constructed event or sequence of events that could degrade performance, compromise safety, or interrupt service, allowing engineers to evaluate consequences and response.

Etymology and scope: The word combines fout (error or fault) and scenario. Foutscenarios span domains such as software and hardware systems, networks, industrial processes, and organizational workflows. They can be deterministic (predefined events) or stochastic (randomized inputs) and are commonly employed in simulations, tabletop exercises, chaos engineering, and reliability testing.

Application: In the design and assessment phase, foutscenarios help identify vulnerabilities, critical dependencies, and single points of failure. They support risk assessment, safety cases, business continuity planning, disaster recovery testing, and compliance activities. Methods often used alongside foutscenarios include failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), fault tree analysis, and resilience engineering. Foutscenarios also guide monitoring, alerting, and automated incident response design.

Examples: A sudden power loss to a data center, a network partition in a distributed service, corrupted backups, or cascading supply-chain disruptions are typical foutscenarios. Tabletop drills or simulated outages are conducted to verify recovery procedures and recovery time objectives.

See also: fault tolerance, failure mode and effects analysis, fault tree analysis, disaster recovery, business continuity, resilience engineering.