Summary

Stress testing puts all your skills as a tester to use: you need to identify all your system’s functions: black-box and white-box testing and all the error cases that can occur, as well as using all the visibility you put in place from monitoring and logging, the degradations from destructive testing, and all the tools from load testing.

With all those tools in place, you can perform tests specific to stress testing. We saw how tests could breach transaction rates with policed and unpoliced limits. We considered the performance of the code, either deliberately handling excessive operations with graceful degradation or suffering from stress-related failures, such as positive feedback loops.

Loading on your system can take different forms – with soak testing over long periods or spikes of load, which can be mitigated with queues. Excess loading can also be caused by limiting system resources, which introduces its own class of issues, as does introducing realistic...