Software & Stress Testing

Stress testing is a check of how software responds to adverse conditions

Stress testing involves pushing software to and beyond it's breaking point to see how it will respond. This is different from performance testing, which checks for impediments to optimal performance, and load testing, which seeks to check how many directions or users software can handle without crashing. Stress testing looks at how software responds under adverse and unusual conditions.

Purpose

The purpose of stress testing software is to find out at what point and under what conditions the software will crash or stop responding, and to see how the program responds under various conditions. Testers also can see how the software responds to a crash, how quickly it recovers and whether there are any lasting effects.

Examples

The types of stress tests performed are determined by what the software is meant to do. Examples of stress testing conditions might include causing a sudden spike in the number of users, shutting down and re-starting network components, reducing the softwares available for computing resources and turning off components on which the software is directly dependent, such as a database.

Software

Software packages are available that will simulate stressful conditions so that they do not have to be created actually. Also, firms exist that will run software through stress, performance and load testing, and provide an objective third party analysis.

References

• Carnegie Mellon University: Software Testing
• Agile Testing: Performance vs. Load vs. Stress Testing
• Faqs: What's the Difference Between Load and Stress Testing?

Resources

• SearchSoftwareQuality: Software Quality Topics: Stress, Load and Software Performance Testing