What is stress testing and why is it useful?

What is stress testing and why is it useful?

Answer: Experience has shown that an effective way to discover defects is to design tests around the limits of the system. In performance testing, this means stressing the system by making demands that are outside the design limits of the software. This is known as ‘stress testing’. Stress testing is particularly relevant to distributed systems based on a network of processors. These systems often exhibit severe degradation when they are heavily loaded. The network becomes swamped with coordination data that the different processes must exchange. The processes become slower and slower as they wait for the required data from other processes. Stress testing helps you discover when the degradation begins so that you can add checks to the system to reject transactions beyond this point.