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What kind of out-of-zone failures do I forget to test?

I came across a terrific presentation years ago (which of course I can't find) that listed a lot of failures for remote services that aren't usually verified by humans.

In addition to timeout, 4xx, 5xx, etc., it lists things like:

  • the connection is closed after 10 bytes of data
  • returns the content of www.google.com
  • returns the contents of / dev / random
  • returns the contents of the / etc / passwd file
  • returns correctly formatted unicode Chinese text
  • returns ansi color control characters
  • returns the wrong content type marked correctly (you requested Content-Type: application / json, I am posting back Content-Type: application / jpeg)
  • returns one byte of data every 29 seconds.

What are some of the types of out-of-band failures that you encounter that developers usually (but should) test?

(extra bonus points if you can find the original presentation)

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The ones you pointed out are great; I'd love to see the original presentation if you dig it up! A couple more favorites:



  • "Valid" answer with pair bits flipped
  • a "valid" response with additional data you did not expect ( {"result": 123, "extraStuff": {...}}

    ) to simulate updates to the remote side.
  • Syntactically valid answer that never ends ( {"results":["lol", "lol", "lol", ...

    or just a bunch of spaces)
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Low frequency failures. In other words, check that some answer is correct not once, but every time after thousands of attempts. If you go over the net, you get a random break on the internet, but you might find some kind of stochastic process if you think it's fixed.



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