Definition

The process of testing that the disaster recovery plans (also known as system contingency plans) and the associated business continuity plans work as specified.

Comment

Many business continuity specialists argue that if you are not going to test your contingency plans (and the recovery to normal operation after the invocation of the contingency), you might just as well not have a contingency plan: at least if you have no plan you know where you are and have no false levels of expectation.

Note that it is also very important to test that you have the potential of returning from your contingency systems to your production systems. Often it takes minutes to invoke a contingency system, but days to return to the production system.