Volume testing is a type of non-functional testing that refers to testing the data load capabilities of a product. For instance, if we expect certain database growth, we may want to artificially grow the database to that size and test the performance of the application when using it. System performance can degrade when large amounts of data must be searched or indexed.

Similar to the load testing aspect of validating the concurrent users’ threshold, volume testing involves validating the system’s performance during an increase of data processing or transfer. This kind of testing can determine the amount of data the application can handle before it starts to display errors or even stop responding.

A very important part of volume testing is data generation. Data variation is very important to simulate real-world scenarios that occur in the production environment. Often, production data is used and then additional data is randomly generated based on the production data. Some of the more common issues found in volume testing are insufficient disk space, buffer overflow problems, database expansion, inefficient queuing process, timeout problems, and indexing issues.

QA Mentor’s QA Performance and Capacity Planning service, as well as our QA Performance Engineering & Optimization can help you determine the volume of data your product can handle so you can be prepared. For instance, we’ll be able to point to the exact number of transactions per minute that causes your application to exhibit stress. We can then work with you to optimize your application for production release and ensure its ability to handle future growth.