Principles of Chaos Engineering

To specifically address the uncertainty of distributed systems at scale, Chaos Engineering can be thought of as the facilitation of experiments to uncover systemic weaknesses. By focusing on systemic behavior patterns during experiments, Chaos verifies that the system does work, rather than trying to validate how it works. To guarantee both authenticity of the way in which the system is exercised and relevance to the current deployed system, Chaos strongly prefers to experiment directly on production traffic.

Source: principlesofchaos.org