Edvliet

 Profile Answers by Edvliet 

• Oct 11th, 2007

 

There are a lot of different types of load/ stress testtypes.

In fact, The testtypes are only Loadtest and Stresstest.
Every testtype has a subset with a special focus of testing.

LoadTest: A test type concerned with measuring the behavior of a component or system with increasing load, e.g. number of parallel users and/or numbers of transactions to determine what load can be handled by the component or system. (ref: ISTQB)

Loadtest has subsets of testtypes:
Latency test: testing the required perioda packet is sent untill it is received in (another) network. How shorter the period, how faster the communicationrate.

Response time test: checking the interval between the user sends a request until the result is received. Attention is required for the measurementpoints (eg. what is the moment the result is received: At the screen or in the users-computer?)

Endurance test: Validating the performance characteristics at a normal workload over a longer period. In fact is this a simluation of the software life cycle. Failures can be found like Memory leakages and maximum storecapacity, performances which should accur over a year.

Stability test: Checking the software product keeps working at normal and stress usage without getting defect, cause a failures of data corruption. Stabilitytesting is requires when the software needs to work in different sw/hw configurations like a videocard in PC's.

Resilience test: Testing the ability of the software product to return to its original form after stress usages or occuring failures.


Stress testing:  Testing conducted to evluate a system or component at or beyond the limits of its specifief requirements. [IEEE 610] (Ref: ISTQB)
The subsets of stresstesting are:

Saturation test: Testing the behaviour of a softwareproduct or system when specific utilizationresource are getting overloaded (Resources like: Memory, CPU load, I/O ports, networkconnections)

Spike test: Testing the behaviour of the softwareproduct at short duration peekload in a specific functionality( eg. using the loginprocedure of a softwareproduct with many users at the same time)

Scalabilitytest: Test which functionality requires the highest workload when the hardware or software is scaled up or scaled out.

There are more subsets, these are the muste used testtypes.
Scalability test: