Many software companies more and more take care about their product quality because of the high competition in the software market. The problem of the extent of the program strength and endurance raises concerns most of all.
Load testing is used exactly for such purposes – it should be obviously conducted with the terms of special conditions for measuring of the facilities of the specified system. During load testing, a tester imitates of the simultaneous work of a great number of users, and this imitation should continuously affect the system during rather long period of time.
Some new-comer testers often confuse load testing with stress testing or volume testing. But the difference exists. Stress testing is focused on the creation of the ultrahigh pressure in order to understand under which conditions the system is crashed or the software failure takes place. Volume testing checks the program by increasing the data number in order to assure that the software is able to process large volumes of data without errors and loss.
The Questions Which Should Be Raised During Load Testing:
- Which specified features should a tester follow in order to strictly determine that the system responds fast enough?
- How to properly set the load size of which the system should undergo?
- How to determine what productivity under the load will be convenient for the user?
- Under what loads will the system crash?
- Is there a necessity to perform some additional work after the execution of load testing, like, for example, reliability testing or performance testing?
In order to conduct load testing of a high quality, it needs to make clear conclusions basing on the questions like these. A tester should remember that his main goal is to ensure the user’s success and convenience but not only to document the errors to be fixed.