Stress Testing

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Stress Testing

In this article, I am going to discuss Stress Testing. Please read our previous article where we discussed Load Testing. At the end of this article, you will understand the following important pointers which are related to Stress Testing.

1. What is Stress Testing?
2. Why is it Necessary for us to Conduct Stress Tests?
3. What are the Objectives of Stress Testing?
4. What is the Purpose of Stress Testing?
5. What are the Features of Stress Testing?
6. Explain Types of Stress Testing
7. Explain the Process of Stress Testing
8. Mention the tools used in Stress Testing
9. Example of Stress Testing
10. What are the Advantages of Stress Testing?
11. What are the Disadvantages of Stress Testing?

What is Stress Testing?

Software testing known as “stress testing” is used to confirm the dependability and stability of software applications. The purpose of stress testing is to evaluate a piece of software’s robustness and error-handling abilities under conditions of extremely high load and to make sure that it won’t crash under pressure. It even conducts testing that goes beyond typical operational conditions to assess how the software performs in harsh environments.

By testing software beyond the parameters of regular functioning, the stress testing technique analyses the software’s resiliency. Although stress testing is used for many types of software, it is particularly crucial for essential software. Instead of focusing on what is appropriate behavior in typical circumstances, stress testing emphasizes robustness, availability, and error handling under a large load. A sort of software testing called stress testing is described as confirming the stability and dependability of the system.

Why is it Necessary for us to Conduct Stress Tests?

If we run into any of the following circumstances, we must conduct stress testing:

1. Every time an online store or e-commerce site announces a sale during the festival, traffic may increase. Or a big publication may mention a piece, causing an unanticipated surge in traffic.
2. If we don’t help with this sudden traffic, we risk losing money and reputation. Therefore, in that situation, we must carry out Stress Testing to incorporate such erratic traffic surges.

The following scenarios also require stress testing to be carried out:

• When the system is under stress, the appropriate error message should be presented.
• To evaluate the system’s performance under unique circumstances.
• Enormous profits may be at risk in critical situations if the system experiences a failure.
• Conducting stress tests will ensure our preparedness for the most extreme situations.

What are the Objectives of Stress Testing?

The following objectives are largely intended to be attained by using stress testing:

• Stress testing is mostly used to ensure that the software does not crash in the absence of computing resources such as disc space, memory, and network requests.
• Stress testing is used to validate that the system breaks and automatically improves, a process known as recoverability.
• Stress testing serves as a valuable tool to pinpoint issues related to hardware malfunctions and data corruption.
• We will use stress testing to help us identify security weaknesses that might appear under a constant high load.
• It aids in determining the software application’s data integrity under the heavy load, suggesting that the data should remain reliable even in the event of a breakdown.

What is the Purpose of Stress Testing?

• Analyze how the application behaves after failure: The goal of stress testing is to examine how the application behaves after failure, and the program should display the proper error messages when operating in challenging situations.
• After a failure, the system recovers: In order to ensure that the system recovers from failure, stress testing looks for plans for restoring it to its operational state.
• Uncover Hardware Issues: Hardware difficulties can be found with stress testing, as can problems with data corruption.
• Finding Security flaws: Stress testing aids in identifying security flaws that could penetrate the system during periods of persistent peak load and compromise it.
• Data integrity is ensured: Stress testing assists in assessing the application’s data integrity under heavy demand, which means that the data should remain reliable even in the event of failure.

What are the Features of Stress Testing?

The fundamental components of stress testing are as follows:

• Additionally, stress testing ensures that unexpected failures won’t compromise security.
• It is used to examine how well a system performs in unusual situations and how well it responds to failures.
• To determine whether the system has saved the data before crashing, stress testing is conducted.
• When a system is under stress, stress testing ensures that the appropriate error message will be displayed.

Explain Types of Stress Testing

1. Server-Client Stress Testing: Server-client stress testing, sometimes referred to as distributed stress testing, is done on each client connected to the server.
2. Product Stress Testing: Product stress testing focuses on identifying flaws in software products that are connected to data locking and blocking, network problems, and performance congestion.
3. Transactional Stress Testing: Stress testing for transactions is a process that involves testing one or more transactions between two or more apps. It is done to optimize the system and make final adjustments.
4. Systematic Stress Testing: Also known as integrated testing, systematic stress testing is used to conduct tests on many systems that are all running on the same server. It is used to find errors where the data of one program prevents the operation of another application.
5. Analytical Stress Testing: Analytical or exploratory stress testing is used to put a system through its paces under anomalous circumstances that are highly improbable to occur in real life. It is done to look for flaws in strange situations like having a lot of people logged in at once or a database going offline when viewed via a website.
6. Application Stress Testing: Also referred to as Product Stress Testing, Application Stress Testing focuses on locating performance bottlenecks and network problems in software products.

Explain the Process of Stress Testing

There are 5 steps in the stress testing procedure:

1. Planning Stress Test: Gathering system data, examining the system, and establishing the stress test objectives are the steps involved in planning the stress test.
2. Create automation scripts: In this stage, test data is generated for the stress test scenarios as well as automation scripts for stress testing.
3. Script Execution: Executing the automation scripts for the stress tests and storing the findings are done in this stage.
4. Result Analysis: Analyzing the results of the stress tests and locating the bottlenecks are part of this phase.
5. Tweaking and Optimization: In order to achieve the required benchmarks, the system must be fine-tuned and the code optimized in this step.

Mention the tools used in Stress Testing

1. JMeter: Apache JMeter is a pure Java-based, open-source stress testing application that is used to stress test websites. It is an Apache project that may be used for load testing in order to evaluate and gauge the effectiveness of various services.
2. LoadNinja: LoadNinja is a stress testing tool created by SmartBear that enables users to create load tests without using any code, replaces load emulators with genuine browsers, and aids in achieving high speed and efficiency using metrics based on browser usage.
3. WebLoad: WebLoad is a stress-testing solution for mobile and web applications that combines performance, stability, and integrity into a single procedure.
4. Neoload: Neoload is a potent performance-testing tool that analyses the server’s behavior while simulating a high number of users. Both web and mobile applications can use it. Neoload interacts with many CI/CD software and offers API testing.
5. SmartMeter: SmartMeter is a user-friendly application that enables the creation of straightforward tests without the need for coding. It doesn’t require any plugins and features a graphical user interface. With full and thorough test findings, this program automatically generates advanced test reports.

Example of Stress Testing

The education board’s results webpage needs to undergo stress testing. Many students, users, and applicants will log in to the specific on the day of some results to verify their marks. The execution of stress testing, therefore, aids in determining the application’s failure and assesses performance and recoverability when the maximum load occurs over a brief period of time or when the outcome is known.

What are the Advantages of Stress Testing?

The following are some crucial advantages of stress testing:

1. Stress testing illustrates the system’s response to failure and ensures that it bounces back rapidly after breakdowns.
2. The system will function well in both regular and irregular settings, which is the main benefit of conducting stress tests.
3. It establishes the software’s ability to scale and improves performance.

What are the Disadvantages of Stress Testing?

The following are some of the most frequent downsides of stress testing:

1. A load testing environment is needed, and it should be built up as closely as feasible to the production environment even in open-source technologies like JMeter.
2. A person should have sufficient scripting expertise in the language that the specific tool supports if they are authoring the Stress test script.
3. Stress testing makes this testing slightly more expensive because it needs more resources.
4. Manually carrying out the Stress Testing would be a time-consuming and difficult operation that might not yield the desired results.

In the next article, I am going to discuss Recovery Testing. Here, in this article, I try to explain Stress Testing. I hope you enjoy this Stress Testing article.