Software Stress Testing

Although there are many “Stress testing software” available in the market, the basic requirement for stress testing remains the same. They all are meant to test the robustness of the software that is being developed. Since there has been huge demand for high tech machines from the people, the companies with a view to fulfill their demands constantly either upgrade their existing equipments/ systems with new versions or develop totally new equipments with better systems and functionality. In this process there is a healthy competition wherein each one is trying to out beat the other. In such a situation the consumer is the king and he has varied options to choose from and gets the best equipment/ software in the most attractive packages in terms of appearance, functionality and cost. On the contrary, the manufacturer and software developer are hard pressed to give a good quality safe product with rich features at minimum cost. The manufacturer/ developer have to ensure that the product functions under all kinds of situations.

The stress testing process is part and parcel of software testing. Stress testing is subjecting a system to an unreasonable load while denying it the resources e.g., RAM, disc, MIPs, interrupts, etc. needed to process that load.  The main purpose is to stress a system to the breaking point in order to find bugs that will make that break potentially harmful. This process ensures that the software or the machine functions appropriately under stressful conditions.  Some of the reasons for stress testing are given below.

	The software being tested is "mission critical" and any failure of the software e.g. crash would have disastrous consequences.
	Insufficient testing time and resources for traditional testing methods
	Customers use the software on computers that have significantly fewer computational resources

The stress testing software has to make sure that the entire software product or the new equipment that has been developed is subjected to a lot of load; the system is not expected to process the overload without adequate resources, but to fail in a decent manner without corrupting or losing data. Under such circumstances the software or machine should switch off automatically. However, no corruption of files or deletion of files should occur. To summarize, the whole stress testing should be executed to ensure that the software does not malfunction.

There are a number of websites which give details on software testing test cases and you are advised to browse through them on the Internet.