Stress Testing

Stress Testing is the testing to verify the response/output of the software beyond the breaking point of the system. In Stress Testing, Test team focus on robustness, availability and the error handling under the heavy load rather then correct behavior under normal circumstances. It is the type of non functional testing.

Stress Testing is also the type of Performance Testing. The goal of Stress Testing to identify the issues which can be generated in the extreme conditions. To check the performance of the system in extreme and unfavorable conditions ( heavy load, Heavy Network Traffic, underclocking, overlocking and maximum request of resources utilization) is called Stress Testing.

Basically in Stress Testing, Test team try to break the system with overwhelming its resources or some resources are taking away from it. The reason to do this to check when the system fail then how system will recover the data gracefully.

In Web Application following are the example for Stress Testing

• Double the HTTP connections
• Resource Reduction such as a dick drive failure
• Unexpected Sequencing
• Unexpected Concurrent requests
• Randomly shut down the Network that connect to the servers
• Take the Database offline and then restart it
• Run the processes that consume resources(CPU, Memory, network) on the Web and Database servers.

Observe how the system react over these changes that showing above

• Does it save its state?
• Does the application hang or Freeze?
• Does it Fail gracefully?
• On restart does it recover from the last good state?
• does the system output error free?
• is the security of the system compromised due to unexpected failure of system?

Reasons of Stress Testing

• Identify the braking point of the system and safe usage limit
• to confirm mathematical model to is accurate enough  in predicting breaking point of the software
• To verify the intendant specifications are met
• to determine how the system will fail