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What is STRESS Testing in Software Testing? Tools, Types, Examples
- Details
Stress Testing
Stress Testing is a type of software testing that verifies stability & reliability of software application. The goal of Stress testing is measuring software on its robustness and error handling capabilities under extremely heavy load conditions and ensuring that software doesn't crash under crunch situations. It even tests beyond normal operating points and evaluates how software works under extreme conditions.
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In Software Engineering, Stress Testing is also known as Endurance Testing. Under Stress Testing, AUT is be stressed for a short period of time to know its withstanding capacity. A most prominent use of stress testing is to determine the limit, at which the system or software or hardware breaks. It also checks whether the system demonstrates effective error management under extreme conditions.
The application under testing will be stressed when 5GB data is copied from the website and pasted in notepad. Notepad is under stress and gives 'Not Responded' error message.
- What is Stress Testing?
- Need for Stress Testing
- Goals of Stress Testing
- Load Testing Vs Stress Testing
- Types of Stress Testing
- How to do Stress Testing?
- Tools recommended for Stress Testing
- Metrics for Stress Testing
Need for Stress Testing
Consider the following scenarios -
- During festival time, an online shopping site may witness a spike in traffic, or when it announces a sale.
- When a blog is mentioned in a leading newspaper, it experiences a sudden surge in traffic.
It is imperative to perform Stress Testing to accommodate such abnormal traffic spikes. Failure to accommodate this sudden traffic may result in loss of revenue and repute.
Stress testing is also extremely valuable for the following reasons:
- To check whether the system works under abnormal conditions.
- Displaying appropriate error message when the system is under stress.
- System failure under extreme conditions could result in enormous revenue loss
- It is better to be prepared for extreme conditions by executing Stress Testing.
Goals of Stress Testing
The goal of stress testing is to analyze the behavior of the system after a failure. For stress testing to be successful, a system should display an appropriate error message while it is under extreme conditions.
To conduct Stress Testing, sometimes, massive data sets may be used which may get lost during Stress Testing. Testers should not lose this security-related data while doing stress testing.
The main purpose of stress testing is to make sure that the system recovers after failure which is called as recoverability.
Load Testing Vs Stress Testing
Jmeter
Jmeter is an Open Source testing tool. It is a pure Java application for stress and Performance Testing. Jmeter is intended to cover types of tests like load, functional, stress, etc. It needs JDK 5 or higher to function.
Stress Tester
This tool provides extensive analysis of the web application performance, provides results in graphical format, and it is extremely easy to use. No high-level scripting is required and gives a good return on investment.
Neo load
This is a popular tool available in the market to test the web and Mobile applications. This tool can simulate thousands of users in order to evaluate the application performance under load and analyze the response times. It also supports Cloud-integrated - performance, load and stress testing. It is easy to use, cost-effective and provides good scalability.
Metrics for Stress Testing
Metrics help in evaluating a System's performance and generally studied at the end of Stress Test. Commonly used metrics are -
Measuring Scalability & Performance
- Pages per Second: Measures how many pages have been requested / Second
- Throughput: Basic Metric - Response data size/Second
- Rounds: Number of times test scenarios have been planned Versus Number of times a client has executed
Application Response
- Hit time: Average time to retrieve an image or a page
- Time to the first byte: Time is taken to return the first byte of data or information
- Page Time: Time is taken to retrieve all the information in a page
Failures
- Failed Connections: Number of failed connections refused by the client (Weak Signal)
- Failed Rounds: Number of rounds it gets failed
- Failed Hits: Number of failed attempts done by the system (Broken links or unseen images)
Conclusion
Stress testing's objective is to check the system under extreme conditions. It monitors system resources such as Memory, processor, network etc., and checks the ability of the system to recover back to normal status. It checks whether the system displays appropriate error messages while under stress.
