Volume Testing

What is a Volume Test?

• Is a type of testing where the software is subjected to a huge volume of data.
• It is also referred to as flood testing.

Function of Volume Tests:

• Is to analyze the system performance by increasing the volume of data in the database.
• Helps to detemine the impact on response time and system behavior which can be analyzed when exposed to a high volume of data.

What to Test [1]:

• Test to check if there is any data loss
• Check the system's response time
• Check if the data is stored correctly or not
• Verify if the data is overwritten without any notification
• Check for warning and error messages, whether it comes at all for volume problems
• Check whether high volume data affects the speed of processing
• Does system have the necessary memory resources
• Does volume test executed on the whole system
• Is there any risk if data volume is greater than specified
• Is there any guarantee that no larger date volume will occur than specified

Test Results:

• Analyze the system’s performance against increased data in terms of response time, data loss, etc.
• Identify the issues that will occur with huge data and the threshold point.
• In case of more than one DB servers, find out the issues with DB communication, i.e. the most prone to failure out of them, etc.

Volume vs. Load Testing, What is the Difference? [2]

• Volume
  • The volume testing is done to verify the database performance against a large volume of data in the DB.
  • The primary focus of this testing is on ‘data’.
  • The database is stressed to the maximum limit.
  • A simple example can be creating a huge sized file.
• Load
  • The load testing is done by changing the user loads for the resources and verifying the performance of the resources.
  • The primary focus of this testing is on ‘users’.
  • The server is stressed to the maximum limit.
  • A simple example can be creating a large number of files.

Reference(s):

• [1] https://www.guru99.com/volume-testing.html
• [2] https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/what-is-volume-testing/
• TestingAcronyms
• CommonTestingTerms