Difference between stress test and breakpoint test

Question

I was looking for the verbal explanations of different performance testing types and saw a new one called "breakpoint test". Its explanation seemed very similar to stress testing for me. So what is the difference, or is there any difference?

Stress Test: A verification on the system performance during extremely high load which is way above the peak load

Breakpoint Test: This test determines the point of system failure by gradually increasing the number of simulated concurrent users.

As far as I know, we increase the load gradually while performing stress test too. So what is the difference between this two type?

Answer 1

From the workload point of view the approach is exactly the same, my understanding is:

• Stress test is about finding the first bottleneck, it's normally applied before deployment or even at early stages of development (see shift-left concept)
• Breakpoint (sometimes also called Capacity) test is about checking how much load the overall integrated environment can handle without issues and what is the slowest component which is a subject for scaling up/optimization.

More information:

• Software Performance Testing Types
• Performance Testing vs. Load Testing vs. Stress Testing
• What Is Performance Testing: Reviewing Load, Stress, & Capacity Testing