Stress testing is a form of testing that is used to determine the stability of a given system or entity. It involves testing beyond normal operational capacity, often to a breaking point, in order to observe the results. Stress testing may have a more specific meaning in certain industries.

Contents 1 IT industry 2 Hardware 3 Medicine 4 Financial sector 5 See also

IT industry

Main article: Stress testing (software)

In software testing, stress testing often refers to tests that put a greater emphasis on robustness, availability, and error handling under a heavy load, rather than on what would be considered correct behavior under normal circumstances. Information technology ( IT) as defined by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA is "the study design development implementation support In Software testing, Stress testing refers to tests that determine the Robustness of software by testing beyond the limits of normal operation Software testing is an Empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test, with respect to the Robustness is the quality of being able to withstand stresses pressures or changes in procedure or circumstance In Telecommunications and Reliability theory, the term availability has the following meanings 1 Exception handling is a programming language construct or computer hardware mechanism designed to handle the occurrence of a condition that changes the normal flow of execution In particular, the goals of such tests may be to ensure the software doesn't crash in conditions of insufficient computational resources (such as memory or disk space), unusually high concurrency, or denial of service attacks. A crash in Computing is a condition where a program (either an application or part of the Operating system) stops performing its expected function and also Disk storage is a general category of a Computer storage mechanisms in which data is recorded on planar round and rotating surfaces ( disks, discs, or In Computer science, concurrency is a properties of system in which several Computational processes are executing at the same time and potentially interacting

Examples:

• A web server may be stress tested using scripts, bots, and various denial of service tools to observe the performance of a web site during peak loads. The term web server can mean one of two things A Computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from web clients which are A shell script is a script written for the shell, or Command line interpreter, of an Operating system. Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet

Hardware

When modifying the operating parameters of a CPU, such as in overclocking, underclocking, overvolting, and undervolting, it may be necessary to verify if the new parameters (usually CPU core voltage and frequency) are suitable for heavy CPU loads. Hardware is a general term that refers to the physical artifacts of a Technology. Underclocking also known as downclocking is the practice of modifying a synchronous circuit's speed settings to run at a lower Clock speed than the manufacturer's The CPU core voltage ( VCORE) is the Power supply Voltage supplied to the CPU (which is a Digital circuit) GPU The clock rate is the fundamental rate in cycles per second (measured in Hertz) at which a Computer performs its most basic operations such as adding two In UNIX Computing, the system load is a measure of the amount of work that a computer system is doing This is done by running a CPU-intensive program (usually Prime95) for a long time, to see if the computer hangs or crashes. Prime95 is the name of the Microsoft Windows -based Software application written by George Woltman that is used by GIMPS, a Distributed computing This article is about the computer malfunction called hanging. A crash in Computing is a condition where a program (either an application or part of the Operating system) stops performing its expected function and also CPU stress testing is also referred to as torture testing. Software that is suitable for torture testing should typically run instructions that utilise the entire chip rather than only a few of its units. In Computer science, an instruction is a single operation of a processor defined by an Instruction set architecture.

Medicine

• A Cardiac stress test is used most commonly to detect marked imbalances in blood flow to the heart muscle. Medicine is the art and science of healing It encompasses a range of Health care practices evolved to maintain and restore Human Health by the A cardiac stress test is a Medical test that indirectly reflects arterial Blood flow to the Heart during Physical exercise

• In obstetrics, both a stress test and a nonstress test are forms of cardiotocography. Obstetrics (from the Latin obstare, "to stand by" is the surgical speciality dealing with the care of a woman and her offspring during Pregnancy In Medicine ( Obstetrics) cardiotocography ( CTG) is a technical means of recording ( -graphy) the fetal heartbeat (

Financial sector

• Instead of doing financial projection on a "best estimate" basis, a company may do stress testing where they look at how robust a financial instrument is in certain crashes. The field of finance refers to the concepts of Time, Money and Risk and how they are interrelated They may test the instrument under, for example, the following stresses:
  • What happens if the market crashes by more than x% this year?
  • What happens if interest rates go up by at least y%?
  • What if half the instruments in the portfolio terminate their contacts in the 5th year?
  • What happens if oil prices rise by 200%?

This type of analysis has become increasingly widespread, and has been taken up by various governmental bodies (such as the FSA in the UK) as a regulatory requirement on certain financial institutions to ensure adequate capital allocation levels to cover potential losses incurred during extreme, but plausible, events. This emphasis on adequate, risk adjusted determination of capital has been further enhanced by modifications to banking regulations such as Basel II. Basel II (also known as Βασιλεία ΙΙ in Greek) is the second of the Basel Accords, which are recommendations on banking laws and regulations Stress testing models typically allow not only the testing of individual stressors, but also combinations of different events. There is also usually the ability to test the current exposure to a known historical scenario (such as the Russian debt default in 1998 or 9/11 terrorist attacks) to ensure the liquidity of the institution.

See also

• Load and performance test tools
• Black box testing
• Load testing
• Performance testing
• Software testing
• White box testing

Black box testing takes an external perspective of the test object to derive test cases Load testing is the process of creating demand on a system or device and measuring its response Performance Testing covers a broad range of engineering or functional evaluations where a material product system or person is not specified by detailed material or component Specifications Software testing is an Empirical investigation conducted to provide stakeholders with information about the quality of the product or service under test, with respect to the Compare with Black box testing. White box testing (aka clear box testing glass box testing or structural testing uses an internal perspective

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