Stress Testing

Stress Testing

Stress testing is used to test the stability & reliability of the system. This test mainly determines the system on its robustness and error handling under extremely heavy load conditions.

It even tests beyond the normal operating point and evaluates how the system works under those extreme conditions. Stress Testing is done to make sure that the system would not crash under crunch situations.

Need for Stress Testing

Consider the following scenarios - 

• During festival time, an online shopping site may witness a spike in traffic, or when it announces a sale.
• When a blog is mentioned in a leading newspaper, it experiences a sudden surge in traffic.

Goals of stress testing:

The goal of stress testing is to analyze the behavior of the system after failure. For stress testing to be successful, system should display appropriate error message while it is under extreme conditions.

To conduct Stress Testing, sometimes, massive data sets may be used which may get lost during Stress Testing. Testers should not lose this security related data while doing stress testing.

The main purpose of stress testing is to make sure that the system recovers after failure which is called as recoverability.

Load Testing Vs Stress Testing

Load Testing	Stress Testing
Load Testing is to test the system behavior under normal workload conditions, and it is just testing or simulating with the actual workload	Stress testing is to test the system behavior under extreme conditions and is carried out till the system failure.
Load testing does not break the system Types of Stress Testing: Application Stress Testing: This testing concentrate on finding defects related to data locking and blocking, network issues and performance bottlenecks in an application. Transactional Stress Testing: It does stress testing on one or more transactions between two or more applications. It is used for fine-tuning & optimizing the system. Systemic Stress Testing: This is integrated stress testing which can be tested across multiple systems running on the same server. It is used to find defects where one application data blocks another application. Exploratory Stress Testing: This is one of the types of stress testing which is used to test the system with unusual parameters or conditions that are unlikely to occur in a real scenario. It is used to find defects around unexpected scenarios like	stress testing tries to break the system by testing with overwhelming data or resources.