What is stress testing?

Stress testing is used evaluate the application's behavior when it is pushed beyond the normal or peak load conditions. The main goal of stress testing is to discover application issues that appear only under high load conditions. These can contain such issues as synchronization problems, race conditions, and memory leaks. Graceful performance degradation under high load leading to non-catastrophic failure is the desired result. Load test engineer could use the same scripts and tools as were used for performance testing, but using a very high level of simulated load.