Stress testing is a form of deliberately intense or thorough testing, used to determine the stability of a given system, critical infrastructure or entity. It involves testing beyond normal operational capacity, often to a breaking point, in order to observe the results.
Reasons can include:
* to determine breaking points or safe usage limits
* to confirm mathematical model is accurate enough in predicting breaking points or safe usage limits
* to confirm intended specifications are being met
* to determine
modes of failure (how exactly a system fails)
* to test stable operation of a part or system outside standard usage
Reliability engineers often test items under expected stress or even under accelerated stress in order to determine the operating life of the item or to determine modes of failure.
[Nelson, Wayne B., (2004), ''Accelerated Testing - Statistical Models, Test Plans, and Data Analysis'', John Wiley & Sons, New York, ]
The term "
stress" may have a more specific meaning in certain industries, such as material sciences, and therefore stress testing may sometimes have a technical meaning – one example is in
fatigue testing
Fatigue testing is a specialised form of mechanical testing that is performed by applying cyclic loading to a ''coupon'' or structure. These tests are used either to generate fatigue life and crack growth data, identify critical locations or de ...
for materials.
In
animal biology, there are various forms of
biological stress and biological stress testing, such as the
cardiac stress test
A cardiac stress test is a cardiological examination that evaluates the cardiovascular system's response to external stress within a controlled clinical setting. This stress response can be induced through physical exercise (usually a treadmill) o ...
in humans, often administered for
biomedical
Biomedicine (also referred to as Western medicine, mainstream medicine or conventional medicine) reasons. In
exercise physiology
Exercise physiology is the physiology of physical exercise. It is one of the allied health professions, and involves the study of the acute responses and chronic adaptations to exercise. Exercise physiologists are the highest qualified exercise ...
, training zones are often determined in relation to metabolic stress protocols, quantifying
energy production
Energy development is the field of activities focused on obtaining sources of energy from natural resources. These activities include the production of renewable, nuclear, and fossil fuel derived sources of energy, and for the recovery and re ...
,
oxygen uptake, or
blood chemistry regimes.
Computing
Materials
Critical infrastructure
Finance
Medical
Cardiac
Childbirth
See also
*
Highly accelerated life test, generally for electronic equipment
*
Fatigue (material)
In materials science, fatigue is the initiation and propagation of cracks in a material due to cyclic loading. Once a fatigue crack has initiated, it grows a small amount with each loading cycle, typically producing striations on some parts of ...
*
Stress (mechanics)
In continuum mechanics, stress is a physical quantity that describes forces present during deformation. For example, an object being pulled apart, such as a stretched elastic band, is subject to ''tensile'' stress and may undergo elongati ...
*
Stress measures In continuum mechanics, the most commonly used measure of stress is the Cauchy stress tensor, often called simply ''the'' stress tensor or "true stress". However, several alternative measures of stress can be defined:
#The Kirchhoff stress (\bold ...
, ways to quantify mechanical stress
*
Structural testing
Structural testing is the evaluation of an object (which might be an assembly of objects) to ascertain its characteristics of physical strength. Testing includes evaluating compressive strength, shear strength, tensile strength, all of which ma ...
*
List of bank stress tests
:''This list covers formal bank stress testing programs, as implemented by major regulators worldwide. It does not cover bank proprietary, internal testing programs.''
A bank stress test is an analysis of a bank's ability to endure a hypothetical ...
, lists major bank stress testing programs with links to details by year
References
{{reflist
Tests
Broad-concept articles