Stability Testing is a type of non functional software testing performed to measure efficiency and ability of a software application to continuously function over a long period of time. The purpose of Stability testing is checking if the software application crashes or fails over normal use at any point of time by exercising its full range of use.
Stability Testing is done to check the efficiency of a developed product beyond normal operational capacity, often to a breakpoint. There is greater significance is on error handling, software reliability, robustness and scalability of a product under heavy load rather than checking the system behavior under normal circumstances.
Stability testing assesses stability problems. This testing is primarily intended to stress the software component to the maximum. It is a Non-Functional Technique.
Risks if System under test has not undergone Stability Test
For an application under test where a large number of users are introduced and applications that have to run for months without restarting, a number of problems are likely to occur:
The possible error can be faced,
- the system slows down
- the system encounters functionality problems
- the system shows wired behavior
- the system crashes altogether
In Software Engineering, Stability Testing typically involves exercising the system with heavy users (virtual) and measuring the performance parameters to verify whether the system can support the anticipated load.
Why do Stability Testing
This kind of testing helps users to understand the ways the system will work in real-life situations.
Hence, Stability Testing allows you to check,
- Provide confidence in the stability of your system under test.
- Ensure that your system can handle large programs.
- Monitor the effectiveness of your system.
- Test system stability under stress.
It plays an important role in product development as it is used to determine the limitations of a software product under test before it is released or the areas of more improvement before the product goes live or at Production.
A very common example of Stability testing technique is
Online Shopping Portals: Stability testing will check how the website will behave when –
- High Amount of data entered at peak time
- Number of hits at a certain specific time
- Page load issue at the same time
- Behavior of system
- Responsiveness of the system and many more come under Stability Testing
Stability Testing Tools
Some of the tools for Performance Testing are as –
- WebLOAD
- LoadRunner
- Apache JMeter
- NeoLoad
- CloudTest
- Loadstorm
- LoadUI
- WAPT
- LoadImpact
- Loadster
- Httperf
- OpenSTA