What is Stress Testing?

Nowadays, testing is conducted to achieve and maintain the stability and quality of a product in the market. Today, we are talking about an important term that is used in software testing; “Stress Testing.” It is a type of testing that can be performed manually as well as automatically. It works together with load, performance and volume testing to get the status report of the working application.

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Stress Testing is a non-functional testing done to determine the working behavior of the software application beyond its functional limits. It is also a type of performance testing to check the threshold limit of a working application. It checks the application’s negative response at and beyond the given limits of its specification. So, the main purpose of stress testing is to ensure that if the system fails, it recovers gracefully. Stress Testing determines the load under which a system fails and how it fails.

Let’s look at the pros and cons of stress testing:

Pros:

• Deep Analysis

This type of testing helps to find the defects in an application which no other test can perform quickly and positively. It goes deep in root of the software application and abstracts all hidden vulnerabilities.

• Constant Monitoring

Stress Testing conducts activities and tests to check whether the software application is able to work under different types of stress. This process of testing continuously monitors the working condition of application on different load levels and makes a record for application failure and recovery steps.

• Defects Detector/ Recognizer

With stress testing, a tester can find defects like memory leaks, deadlocks, software asserts, and configuration conflicts in a software application.

Cons:

• Time Consuming

Stress Testing can prove to be time consuming and tedious for a tester testing an application. It requires enough patience and time to be performed.

• Crashes or Failure

Although performing stress tests is a good practice for a tester and for the software application, but sometimes due to extreme load and stress pressure a software system fails to perform the required functionality. This may further lead to increase in maintenance cost for the application.

Wrapping Up

Stress testing is a form of thorough testing to determine stability of a given system. It plays an important role in maintaining the desired quality of a product.

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