In software testing, stress testing is an important part of performance testing under non-functional testing.
Stress Testing is testing used to check the accessibility and robustness of software beyond usual functional limits. It mainly considers for critical software but it can also be used for all types of software applications.
Stress testing is used to verify the constancy and dependability of the system and also make sure that the system would not crash under disaster circumstances.
Objectives of stress testing:
-The primary purpose of executing the stress testing is to confirm that the software does not crash in lacking computational resources like disk space, memory, and network request.
-The implementation of stress testing certifies that the system fails and improves effortlessly, known as the recoverability process.
-We can use stress testing to discover hardware issues, data corruption issues.
-Stress testing will help us to identify the security weaknesses that might sneak-in throughout constant peak load.
-It helps determine the software application’s data integrity throughout the extreme load, which implies that the data should be in a dependable state after a failure.
Needs of stress testing:
-When the system is under stress, it should display a proper error message.
-To inspect whether the system works under bizarre circumstances.
-If the system is failed under risky situations could result in huge profits loss.
-By implementing Stress Testing, we will be prepared for extreme conditions.
Basic features of stress testing:
-Stress testing also makes sure that unpredicted failures do not cause security issues.
-It is used to analyze the system works under rare circumstances and the system’s behavior after a failure.
-Stress testing is used to check the system has saved the data before crashing or not.
-Stress testing guarantees to display a suitable error message when the system is under stress.
Categories of stress testing:
-Product or Application stress testing
-Server-client or distribute Stress Testing
-Analytical Stress Testing
-Systematic Stress Testing
-Transactional Stress Testing
Benefits of performing Stress testing:
-Stress testing signifies the system’s behavior after failure and makes sure that the system recovers quickly from the crashes.
-The most important advantage of executing the stress testing will make the system work in regular and irregular conditions in a suitable way.
-It determines the scalability and enhance the performance of the software.
Drawbacks of Stress testing:
-Even in open-source tools like JMeter, a load testing environment is required, which should be as close to the production environment setup as possible.
-If we are writing the Stress test script, the person should have enough scripting knowledge of the language supported by the particular tool.
-If we are using stress testing, it will require additional resources, which makes this testing bit costlier.
-If we perform the Stress Testing manually, it became a tedious and complicated task to complete, and it may also not produce the expected results.
Stress testing entirely concentrate on testing the system under extreme load situations to detect its breaking point and see if suitable messages are shown when the system is not responsive.