Stress Testing Types

Introduction to Stress Testing

The following article provides an outline for Stress Testing Types. Stress Testing, also known as Endurance Testing, is a testing method of software that verifies the strength and reliability of a software application. The main objective of this method is to test whether a particular software application is robust and capable of handling errors efficiently in extreme load conditions and ensuring that this application or system does not slow down or crash when exposed to heavy load conditions.

It tests the software by giving extreme load conditions and analyze its work in different situations. Any application or software is kept under these testing methods for a short time and stressed continuously to know its final withstanding capacity until a software or a system breaks. In general, the application undergoes several tests until it pops up a not responding message window.

Need for Stress Testing

Consider a situation of getting enormous traffic to your website or blog and, if it is unable to handle such traffic, it suddenly goes down results in financial loss and a decrease in eminence. But if you perform such tests before launching your website, you will come to know the exact problem, and you can solve it by making it efficient to handle stress like traffics before launching your website.

Stress testing is very useful for the following situations:

• To ensure whether an application or system works in extreme stress conditions.
• To decide what messages to pop up when the system undergoes stress.
• It results in revenue loss when it is unable to handle more stress.

Objectives of Stress Testing

• The main objective of stress testing is to handle stress and recover again under extreme conditions known as recoverability.
• When a system undergoes stress, it will have two options to follow, first is to solve the obtained error in no time, second to show a popup message until the issue is solved.

Various Types of Stress Testing

There are five methods to test stress in an application or a system.

• Distributed Stress Testing
• Application Stress Testing
• Transactional Stress Testing
• Systemic Stress Testing
• Exploratory Stress Testing

1. Distributed Stress Testing

In this testing method, testing over a system is performed for all the clients from the server. The work of the stress server is to distribute a set of tests to all the stress-performing clients and monitor their performance. In this method, the client contacts the server as the first step then, the server accepts the client and registers the client name, and starts sending various test scenarios.

While performing these tests, the client system sends signals to the distributed server continuously, and when the signals are stopped, the server decides that the system needs to be investigated and indicates to solve the obtained bugs. A server can connect to two clients at a time, but it cannot connect to more clients at a time and receive signals. So, distributing a set of tests to clients and monitoring them is the main role and responsibility of Distributed Stress Testing method.

2. Application Stress Testing

This testing technique mainly focuses on finding defects related to locking of the data and blocking, It also focuses on network issues and performance issues in an application.

3. Transactional Stress Testing

This testing technique is done on every transaction that is made in between one or more computers or applications. This technique mainly focuses on optimizing the system and fine-tuning it.

4. Systemic Stress Testing

This is a multiple stress testing technique in which we can test many systems at a time on the same server. This technique focuses on finding defects.

5. Exploratory Stress Testing

This is the most efficient stress testing method which tests the system having unusual parameters and conditions that don’t match with the real scenarios. It finds the defects in unusual scenarios.

How Stress Testing is Done?

Stress testing is usually performed in 5 steps:

• Step 1: You gather data related to the system or the application and analyze from the obtained data on which you want to perform tests.
• Step 2: Create testing scripts that you pass to the system or application to perform tests. So in this step, you generate that test data to perform tests in different scenarios.
• Step 3: In this step, you run all the stress test data that is created and store the result of each test case result.
• Step 4: In this step, we analyze the final result. We identify each stress test result obtained.
• Step 5: In this step, you finally fine-tune the whole system and accordingly change configurations and optimize the code to meet the desired output.

Finally, you again have to run the entire cycle to ensure that every test has produced the desired output.

Tools for Stress Testing

Given below are the tools mentioned:

• Load Runner: The load Runner tool is considered one of the best Load testing tools. The results of this tool are very accurate and precise.
• JMeter: This testing tool is an open-source testing tool that is built in Java for testing the performance and efficiency of the system.
• Stress Tester: This tool is very easy to use and provides results in graphical format. This is the only tool in which no high-level scripts are required.
• Neo Load: This is the very popular tool among all the currently available tools and is used to test web and mobile applications. This tool also records the responses of each test case.

Conclusion

Stress Testing, also known as Endurance Testing, is a testing method of software that verifies the strength and reliability of a software application. It tests the software by giving extreme load conditions and analyze its work in different situations. The application or system undergoes several tests until it pops up a not responding message window. If your website is unable to handle huge traffic, it suddenly goes down resulting in financial loss and a decrease in eminence. But if you perform such tests before launching your website, you will come to know the exact problem your system facing.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to Stress Testing Types. Here we discuss the introduction, need, objectives, various types of stress testing, how stress testing is done? & tools. You may also have a look at the following articles to learn more –

1. Non Functional Testing Types
2. Penetration testing phases
3. Manual Testing Tools
4. Soapui Load Test