Healthcare.gov System Recovery Testing

Three-Tiered Testing Approach:

Component Testing Layer

28,000 JUnit tests (85% coverage)

Contract testing for all 43 APIs (Pact)

Database transaction isolation testing

Integration Testing Layer

Synthetic user journey generator (Selenium Grid)

Chaos engineering for failure scenarios (Chaos Monkey)

Stateful session testing (Jmeter + Blazemeter)

Production Validation Layer

Dark launch canary testing

Synthetic monitoring (New Relic)

A/B test validation (Optimizely)

Specialized Testing Implementations:

Eligibility Rules Engine Testing

def test_medicaid_eligibility(household):
    for state in STATES:
        expected = calculate_manual_eligibility(household, state)
        system_result = check_eligibility(household, state)
        assert abs(expected - system_result) < 0.01  # Allow 1% variance

Performance Test Automation

# Run load test with increasing users
for users in 1000 5000 10000 50000; do
    jmeter -n -t HealthcareLoad.jmx -Jusers=$users -Jrampup=300
    analyze_latency "Eligibility Check" ${users}
done

Critical Discoveries & Fixes

Discovery 1: Database Deadlock Cascade

Symptom: System froze during 5,000-user tests

Root Cause: Concurrent updates to household records

Fix:

-- Before
UPDATE households SET status = 'verified' WHERE id = ?;

-- After
BEGIN TRANSACTION;
SELECT * FROM households WHERE id = ? FOR UPDATE;
UPDATE households SET status = 'verified' WHERE id = ?;
COMMIT;

Discovery 2: Memory Leak in Eligibility Engine

Symptom: 2% performance degradation/hour

Root Cause: Unreleased rule evaluation contexts

Fix:

// Before
public EligibilityResult evaluate(RuleSet rules) {
    EvaluationContext ctx = new EvaluationContext();
    // ... 
}

// After
try(EvaluationContext ctx = new EvaluationContext()) {
    return evaluator.evaluate(rules, ctx);
}

Discovery 3: Third-Party Service Failure

Symptom: IRS verification failed silently

Root Cause: No circuit breaker pattern

Fix:

<resilience4j.circuitbreaker>
  <instances>
    <irsVerification>
      <failureRateThreshold>50</failureRateThreshold>
      <waitDurationInOpenState>5000</waitDurationInOpenState>
    </irsVerification>
  </instances>
</resilience4j.circuitbreaker>