Why Is Stress Testing So Valuable?

Non-functional testing can take many different forms and examines elements of software other than its functionality, such as its usability, performance, and stability. Computer hardware should generally undergo exaggerated amounts of stress during stress testing to ensure stability when used in a typical context. Extremes in workload, job type, memory utilization, thermal load (heat), clock speed, or voltages are a few examples. These tests are frequently used to stress test the CPU and memory. According on how the system will be utilized, hardware stability and stress testing may differ. A system that needs to be able to execute a single game with reasonable dependability may require a different stress test than one for one that runs round-the-clock or that does error-sensitive jobs like remote computing or "folding" projects.

Stress testing allows the test team to interpret the performance of the system in the event of a failure. This allows the test team to verify whether the data was saved by the software before the crash, or to understand the behavior of the software before the crash. During the crash, the software may introduce security issues that will cause problems in the future. This allows the test team to understand that unexpected failures will not compromise the security of the software. By conducting stress tests, developers and testers can prepare their software for extreme situations. This test also checks software stability. If a system fails under stress, the company can lose significant revenue.

Utilizing stress testing is primarily intended to achieve the following goals:

To ensure that the software does not crash in the absence of computational resources such as disk space, memory, and network requests.
To validate that the system breaks and automatically improves, a process known as recoverability.
To identify hardware problems and data corruption problems.
Stress testing will assist us in finding security flaws that could emerge under persistent high load.
To assess the software application's data integrity under the heavy load, suggesting that the data should remain reliable even in the event of a breakdown.

The importance of stress testing

Considering the scenario of world cup 2022, payment gateways and e-wallets recently face the highest amount of traffic during the process of football viewers’ registration.

Therefore, it is always important to perform stress tests to deal with such unusual situations which, if not handled effectively, can lead to loss of revenue and reputation.

Here are the reasons why stress testing is extremely valuable

A suitable error message ought to be displayed when the system is under pressure.
To test the system's functionality under unusual situations.
Huge earnings could be lost if the system fails in dangerous circumstances.
Stress testing will help us be ready for the worst-case scenario.

Types of stress testing

Distributed stress testing: In this type, system testing is performed on all clients present on the server. It is also known as distributed client-server testing, which distributes stress tests to all stress clients on the server to observe the state of the client. The server starts sending data to the client for testing as soon as it adds the client to the server after making contact. The client system send a signal to the server to indicate it is connected, if the server does not receive any signal, the client system needs to be checked for debugging.
Application stress testing: This type of stress testing typically involves identifying performance-based failures, network problems, and data crashes and locks in the software.
Transaction stress testing: This test is performed on transactions between two or more systems. This test is often used to optimize and tune the system.
Systemic stress testing: This test typically checks for errors where data from one application is blocking the other. This test can be tested on multiple systems using the same.
Exploratory stress testing: This type of stress test usually involves unexpected conditions being introduced into a system to check if it can withstand that condition. These are settings that are unlikely to occur under real-world conditions, such as several users logging on simultaneously or simultaneously inserting large amounts of data into the database.

Example of stress testing are :

To perform stress testing of an e-commerce application, a large number of users access the simulated application.
The number of simulated users for testing will be much higher than the average number of users accessing the app daily.
These users are virtual and programmed to perform common operations, such as viewing products, adding and removing items from the cart, purchasing products, and more.
The number of users increases to the point where the application crashes or fails and can no longer handle the traffic.
Test results are reviewed to find bottlenecks or weaknesses in the system, areas to improve or better performance, recovery mechanisms, and more.

To summarize, the sole purpose of stress testing is to determine the performance of the system under extreme conditions or loads as evaluates system resources like memory, CPU, network, etc. and checks the flexibility of the system after a crash. Therefore, stress testing is extremely valuable as it involves conducting simulations and verifies if the system displays the appropriate error message under stress and find hidden weaknesses.