🔥 Stress Testing

Stress Testing is a harsh form of testing, the purpose of which is to learn about the capabilities and weaknesses of a product by pushing it through failure and beyond.

Advantages

- Expose some weaknesses that may arise in the field
- Expose security risks
- Perhaps good for assessing performance, reliability, or efficiency

Disadvantages

- Will not expose any weaknesses that are not made more visible by stress

Example

A web application could be flooded with data, connections, and so on until it finally crashes. The fact of the crash might be unremarkable. However the consequences of the crash, what else fails, what data is corrupted ans so on, are the result of interest for the stress tester.