What are different aspects of volume testing?

Volume is a non functional requirement of any software system or application and therefore rightly falls under the category of non functional testing methodologies. Non functional testing methodologies are often misunderstood due to over lapping of scope between the several non functional concepts.

- Volume testing as the name suggests is the testing of a software system or application with a significant amount of data.
- The data can be meaningful or meaning less.
- The significant volume of data which is being used for volume testing cam be of size of a file of interface which has been taken as the subject of the volume testing or it can be of the size of a database either large or small.
- For carrying out the volume testing on any particular software system or application with a specific size of data base, the size of data base is increased to that extent and the testing is carried out on it.

We can take another example in which the software system or application needs to interact with some file of an interface. The file can be of any format whether .txt, .xml, .html, .dat and so on. We can think of this interaction as an action to be performed like reading and writing on to and from the particular file. In this case we will first create a sample file similar to the file size we want and then we will carry out the volume testing on that file and its functionality and specifications.

SOME IMPORTANT POINTS
- Volume testing is also referred to as stability testing when it comes to terms of performance.
- The volume testing is aimed at finding the vulnerabilities of a software system or application in respect to its data handling capability when it comes to handle exceptionally large amounts of data for a prolonged period of time.
- Sometimes it may seem to you that the volume testing is much similar to load testing and stress testing, but the objective of the volume testing actually makes the difference.
- Volume testing differs from load testing and stress testing differs when it comes to the expected result and what is actually being simulated?
- At first it may seem like does significance of volume really matters?
- But when you start analyzing, you will discover that indeed volume has a great deal to do with the non functional requirements of a software system or applications.
- Volume testing becomes important while setting up a web server or a client server or while making changes to it.
- The first question that arises while setting up a network or a system is that whether or not it will be able to handle huge expected volume of data?
- The objective of volume testing is to ensure that the whole software system or application works properly and processes data correctly within the physical and logical boundaries of the system while still maintaining the standard of performance.
- One thing to be noted is that the volume testing focuses on determining the robustness and reliability of the software system rather than determining the responsiveness of the software system.