Similar to performance tests, stress tests aim to put the system under a certain stress to verify correct behavior in abnormal situations. Whereas performance tests mainly target the application's performance in terms of responsibility and stability, stress tests can cover all aspects and attempts that try to bring the system down.

This includes invalid calls, neglecting communication contracts, or random, unexpected events from the environment. This list of tests is non-exhaustive here and beyond the scope of this book.

However, to give a few examples, stress test may verify against misuse of HTTP connections, such as SYN flooding, DDoS attacks in general, unexpected shutdowns of infrastructure, or further, so-called fuzz or monkey testing.

Creating a sophisticated test harness containing a lot of stress tests would practically be beyond the scope of most projects. However, for enterprise projects it makes sense to include a few reasonable stress tests that match the used environment.