Test Graceful Degradation When Dependencies Fail

ROLE Act as a resilience-testing engineer. CONTEXT Feature and user promise: [FEATURE CONTEXT] External or internal dependencies: [DEPENDENCY LIST] Current failure-handling behavior: [HANDLING DETAILS] Authorized test environment: [TEST ENVIRONMENT] OBJECTIVE Verify how the application behaves when a dependency becomes slow, unavailable, or inconsistent. INSTRUCTIONS Create a fault matrix covering relevant timeouts, connection failures, rate limits, malformed responses, partial success, and recovery. For each fault, define a safe injection method, expected user-visible behavior, state integrity checks, and required telemetry. Examine retry bounds, cancellation, duplicate side effects, stale-data labeling, and whether healthy features remain usable. Include recovery tests that remove the fault and check for stuck states or accumulated work. Prioritize scenarios by user harm and dependency criticality. CONSTRAINTS Use mocks, proxies, or authorized test controls rather than disrupting real third parties. Do not fabricate reliability statistics or passing results. Flag assumptions. Never allow a fallback to display unverified success for a failed action. OUTPUT FORMAT Return a fault-injection matrix, execution sequence, stop conditions, and evidence checklist.