ANSI and IEEE have defined robustness as the degree to which a system or component can function correctly in the presence of invalid inputs or stressful environmental conditions.
[1] The term "robustness testing" was first used by the Ballista project at Carnegie Mellon University.
[2] The term was also used by OUSPG and VTT researchers taking part in the PROTOS project in the context of software security testing.
[3] Eventually the term fuzzing (which security people use for mostly non-intelligent and random robustness testing) extended to also cover model-based robustness testing.
Fault injection is a testing method that can be used for checking the robustness of systems.