Can your software handle the stress?

9
Jan/081

Can your software handle the stress?

Testing is one of the most important things that you should do when developing software. I already talked about testing, but I didn’t cover stress testing it. To read the earlier article you must register to Tips & Tricks service.

Stress testing is as important as any other testing. Few points why you want to do stress testing :

Whatever somebody does, you don’t want your software to crash.
Usability – if you can’t stress test it, maybe the user interface is a bit too complex.
Test features.

Test the unexpected cases, you can’t write all of these in unit tests. Stress testing is way to do loads testing at once without manually writing each test case. Also remember the “it cannot happen” – case, which you should always test as it probably will happen.

So, how to do it?

‘Nothing Real’

Make stress tester to call randomly any of your functions with random values -> it should not crash!

Partly Doing The Right Thingie

Make stress tester to use templates (use cases) and call them in random order with random data. In here you want to be testing the result as you can affect to it. For example you have a template renderPixelToMiddle and while calling it you feed different screen resolutions, in the end you should always be able to read the pixel from x(screenWidth/2) and y(screenHeight/2) – also remember to test the reverse, there should not be pixels anywhere else.

Note : stress tester is sometimes referred as smoke tester.

I really recommend trying to do a simple stress tester for your software to see how much it can help. I bet that you’ll find problems if you haven’t done it. Have fun!