Stress testing in software testing
There are many types of performance testing techniques, one of them is stress testing. It refers to the testing of the software in determining whether its performance is satisfactory under extreme load conditions or not.
Most systems are developed for normal operating conditions, therefore if operating conditions become abnormal (for example: if load of simultaneous users visiting the website goes beyond the maximum limit) but your system has undergone stress testing then errors would be negligible even under abnormal conditions.
Even though stress testing is important, most projects do not perform stress testing until the end of their software development life cycle (SDLC), which can have serious consequences, if there are performance issues in the application.
- It is a type of non-functional testing
- It involves testing beyond normal operational capacity, often to a breaking point, in order to observe the results
- It is a form of software testing that is used to determine the stability of a given system
- It put greater emphasis on robustness, availability and error handling under a heavy load, rather than on what would be considered correct behavior under normal circumstances
- The goals of such tests may be to ensure the software does not crash in conditions of insufficient computational resources (such as memory, disk space, network request etc)
- Stress testing is also called fatigue testing
