What are different characteristics of endurance testing?

The term endurance defines the stamina, durability, resilience and the sufferance of something and its ability to perform actively and exert itself for a long period of time.

- Endurance also stands for the ability of the thing to resist, recover from and withstand.
- It also gives the degree of immunity of a thing towards trauma, fatigue or wounds.
- For software systems or applications, endurance testing has been developed to check the endurance of the software system or applications.
- Endurance testing is also known as soak testing.
- It is carried out to determine if the concerned software system or application can sustain the expected continuous load.
- The memory utilization is monitored during the endurance testing.
- This is done so as to check the potential memory leaks.
- The endurance is checked during the endurance testing but quite often, performance degradation is overlooked.
- The good response times and throughput are ensured throughout the life of the software system or application i.e., from the beginning of the usage of the software system or application to the last time of usage.

The endurance testing is aimed at testing the sustainability of a software system or application. Its goal is to check how the system behaves or responds under the prolonged significant pressure or load for an extended and significant period of time.

- It aims to test how the software system or application behaves under the sustained use.
- Endurance testing checks for the problems that may occur as a result of prolonged execution of the software program.
- It tests the application or the system under heavy loads of data for a desired period of time which is typically more than the normal usage time.
- Endurance testing is usually carried out to identify the problems that the software system or applications face under the prolonged execution.
- It also aims at identifying the buffer flows and memory leaks which are otherwise not identifiable without carrying out the endurance testing.
- The testing for the behavior of the program under significant load over a significant period of time is done with normal ramp down and ramp up time.

This can be illustrated with the following example:

- Always some memory is allocated to the objects of the program.
- In some cases it happens that the allocated memory is not de- allocated and thus remains occupied.
- This leads to a situation of over consumption of memory in which a chunk of memory is again and again taken away by the program whenever it is executed.

- Eventually the software program reaches a point when the leftover memory is not sufficient for the program to execute.
- At this point, the program crashes and is reported to have a breakdown. Such a situation is called a memory leak.
- Endurance testing is a part of performance testing.
- The other types of testings under performance testing include load testing, volume testing, and stress testing.
- The basic aim of the endurance is to check and correct the performance related problems being faced by the software system or application.
- Those problems appear only after the software system or application has been running for a long time under some significant load or stress.
- Some of the endurance test cases are available for free and have been checked into repository.
- It is recommended to include a report argument so that you visualize the usage of memory during the test and share it.
- The endurance tests create a real world model which employs a normal and high load pattern of usage for the software system or application to determine its potential and problems.