4 Reasons to Stress Test Your Application before Deployment
As you know, software testing is a way to check the correctness of your product. It checks all the aspects like usability, re-usability, performance, scalability, etc. After evaluation, we know whether our product is defect free or not. Also, it determines under which conditions the product is not functioning properly. Testing includes checking the flow of a code in various environments. It's better to determine whether it works with real-time use cases or not. It can be done manually as well as with the automated script.
In a real-time scenario, performance testing is very important. It simply checks if your application performs well under a certain workload or not. Performance testing checks for stability, speed, and reliability. Main goal of it is to eliminate performance congestion. The system should be stable and reliable to attract a large audience.
Types of Performance Testing
Load testing
Load testing is done to check the system's performance under anticipated user loads. To determine performance congestion before launch it is important to do load testing.
Stress testing
Our system will defiantly break under extremely heavy user loads. To determine at which point our system break we need to perform stress testing.
Endurance testing
Now we know that extreme load may come at any point in time. So we need to check sure that if that scenario came then how long our system can perform well. This can be done via performing endurance testing.
Volume testing
Volume testing is related to the database. What happened when a large number of records are stored data in the database? What happened to the system then? These types of questions are solved via performing volume testing. In short, it's a technique to check performance under heavy database load.
Scalability testing
Spike testing is to determine the system's behavior when there's a sudden change in traffic variations. The load can be increased or decreased, it is based on users.
Spike testing
Spike testing is to determine system's behavior when there's sudden change in traffic variations. Load can be increased or decreased, it is based on users.
Now you know the type of testing, let's understand why you need to perform **stress testing. **
Reasons for Stress Testing
There are several phases when a product encountered a huge load on a system. Like during the Black Friday sale, an e-commerce web system was bombarded with mass users or when a major event occurred worldwide, news sites encountered a heavy load. At that time, if you have done stress testing then you can easily survive that situation. Imagine if you failed to do that then you might encounter heavy loss in terms of user and revenue.
One of the main reasons to perform stress testing is to determine what happened with the system if a database goes down due to a heavy load. There is a chance that database read-write operation may slow down if you query a large number of data in a small span. So that type of situation needs to be handled. Database operation is very crucial. If it goes down or something bad happens then you might lose the important data of a user.
Another reason to do stress testing is when your system goes down due to a performance issue then it creates a bad impression on the end user. Which directly impacts the company's reputation and growth. Many times a company faces revenue loss in that situation. Overall users will be redirected to an alternative source.
An important reason to perform stress testing is to notify the end user that our system experienced downtime so they understand the situation. Imagine you're placing an order but the payment page is not loading. How frustrating that is? So if you know that you can handle up to certain users at the same time then you may throw a notification to a user that waits for some time before proceeding ahead. So, the user will be having some idea of what's going on. This is just an example but you can provide a better user experience if you have done stress testing.
When you're using a distributed system, at that time checking stress testing is a must. Here you can check with the stress server that it sends loads to all your clients and get a status report for the same. If a client went down, you need to debug and solve the issue.
Stress testing is also advantageous because it helps you prepare for worst case scenarios and tests the system on its ability to work under abnormal conditions.
Conclusion
Testing is necessary when you want the system to perform well in each condition. Performance testing is important part of testing cycle. It helps to determine defects related to system's performance and which is necessary to solve it before making it live. User want proper and defect free product. If your system attracts large audience within short span of time and you missed stress testing then you may loose users and revenue both. Stress testing is integral part of performance testing and it should be done before product release.