Robustness testing, also known as resilience testing or stress testing, is a type of software testing that focuses on evaluating the software’s ability to handle exceptional or unexpected inputs, conditions, or loads. The objective of robustness testing is to determine how well the software can withstand and recover from abnormal situations without crashing, producing incorrect results, or compromising its functionality.
Robustness testing involves subjecting the software to various stressors or unfavorable conditions that go beyond normal usage scenarios. This testing technique aims to identify weaknesses or vulnerabilities in the software and assess its ability to handle adverse situations. The stressors can include:
- Invalid Inputs: Testing the software’s response to invalid or unexpected input values, such as non-numeric characters in a field that expects only numbers or input that exceeds the maximum allowed length. The goal is to ensure that the software gracefully handles and provides appropriate error handling for such inputs.
- High Loads: Applying a high volume of data, concurrent users, or requests to the software to assess its performance under heavy loads. This helps identify bottlenecks, scalability issues, or resource limitations that may affect the software’s performance or stability.
- Low Resources: Testing the software’s behavior when system resources, such as memory, disk space, or network bandwidth, are limited or constrained. This can help determine if the software handles resource constraints gracefully and recovers properly when resources become available again.
- Unexpected Conditions: Simulating unexpected scenarios, such as sudden power loss, network interruptions, or hardware failures, to verify how the software reacts and recovers from such events. This can involve abruptly terminating processes, disconnecting network connections, or causing other disruptions to assess the software’s resilience.
- Time Duration: Testing the software’s behavior over an extended period to identify any issues related to memory leaks, performance degradation, or accumulation of errors over time. This helps assess the software’s stability and its ability to operate reliably for extended durations.
The goal of robustness testing is to uncover potential weaknesses in the software and improve its fault tolerance, resilience, and recovery capabilities. By subjecting the software to challenging scenarios and stress conditions, robustness testing helps identify and address vulnerabilities that may otherwise remain undetected in regular testing or during normal usage.