Building a product that the general public will use often demands that you run several tests even as the product nears completion.
Most of these testing and development coincide in what is popularly known as the Agile Testing Environment. Yet as products such as systems, applications, software approach the launch stage, additional tests such as load testing also need to be carried out.
Both load and stress testing use simulated events and scenarios to test the system’s capacity or application to demonstrate how it would behave under various actual life conditions.
Most people, therefore, often confuse load testing and stress testing to mean the same thing.
However, these are entirely different concepts that serve particular purposes during performance testing, and in this article, we will look at them separately then compare them to see their differences.
What Is Load Testing?
Load testing uses virtual users and creates simulations to test the capacity of an application, system, or program.
The process uses specialized tools to send continuous traffic load to the application after specific parameters and criteria have been set and noted.
Then you can go ahead to measure response time, throughput rates, or breaking points depending on the criteria you have established.
You can also use a benchmark or baseline to determine how well the application handles traffic and whether or not the performance is up to par.
Load testing can help identify lags, issues, and other drawbacks that can be promptly fixed to improve the application. We also suggest that you check out this blog post to learn more about load testing.
What Is Load Testing Used For?
To better understand what load testing is, let us see what it is used for. Load testing is first used to mimic real-life users and situations to test a system and see how it would respond under normal and abnormal circumstances.
It is also used to identify where the bottlenecks in a system lie and provide recommendations that can be used to make immediate adjustments and improvements.
Lastly, load testing improves the confidence and trust in an application. The earlier issues are discovered and fixed, the better the application gets, and the higher the confidence in that product before launch.
What Is Stress Testing?
This is another type of performance testing used to test the functionality of a product just before it is made available for public consumption.
However, stress testing differs from load testing; you deliberately place so much load on the system until it completely breaks.
As brutal as this might sound, stress testing is also crucial in product development as it helps to point out the exact breaking point of the program, application, or system.
Stress testing takes the load handling capacity of a system to its boundaries by continually increasing the load until it crashes.
What Is Stress Testing Used For?
The primary use of stress testing is to determine the point at which a system or application breaks down. It often checks for how a system would react when the unexpected happens.
But apart from revealing the point at which a system breaks down, stress testing is also used to identify how a system acts just before failing.
This allows the company to register this behavior and take necessary actions when the system is launched into the real world. This action could initiate a backup system or save all data before the system crashes.
In practice, stress testing can help an e-commerce brand understand the best way to handle the type of traffic that comes in during a Black Friday or Cyber Monday promo sales.
Stress testing can help the brand handle such intense traffic influx capable of crashing any system correctly.
A Comparison of Load Testing and Stress Testing
It is important to compare both processes to determine how load testing differs from stress testing.
They may act to safeguard a system and save the brand from financial losses and reputational damages, but they are two very different exercises.
For instance, while load testing is carried out to see how a system would handle regular events and whether it meets specific criteria, stress testing focuses on discovering the behavior at the unexpected.
The test of choice should be load testing when looking to see how an application can handle regular traffic load and behave under ordinary conditions.
However, if you are looking to see what could cause the system to crash and how it behaves under the expected, pushing it beyond its boundaries through stress testing is the way.
Conclusion
Performance testing for any system, program, or application will help avert many problems, including spending money fixing repeated crashes and losing customers due to frustration.
Some of the most common tests include load testing and stress testing, which despite helping to create a better product, differ significantly, as seen above.
