What is Performance testing and robustness testing ?

 Q : What is performance testing ?

Performance testing is the process of verifying that the performance of the device under test meets an acceptable level. Performance testing is a super set of line speed testing in that performance applies to many aspects of a network device or application, and not just line speed.

For example, in the Session Initiation Protocol, one could measure the response time of a device to an INVITE request. In the Transmission Control Protocol, one could measure the response time to an ACK.

Q : What is Robustness (Security) Testing ?

Robustness testing is the process of subjecting a device under test to particular input streams.  The input streams may be one of three types:

  (1) Random input streams

  (2) Valid input streams

  (3) Invalid input streams

An example of an intelligent robustness test is to send a ping with a packet greater than 65,536 octets to the device under test (the default ping packet size is 64 octets).  In the late 1990’s, this oversized packet would often cause the destination device to crash. Because an IP datagram of 65536 bytes is illegal, the receiving device should reject it. Many operating system implementations, though, were only designed to accept valid inputs, and only tested with valid inputs. 

 Q - What is Interoperability Testing ?

Interoperability testing is the process of testing devices from multiple manufacturers by interacting in such a manner as to exercise the network protocol(s) under test. Generally the devices are set up, synchronized, and send and receive data.

Examples include SIPIT (Session Initiation Protocol Interoperability Test), the RMON Test Summit (Remote Monitoring of SNMP data), the SNMP Test Summit (Simple Network Management Protocol), and the TCP/IP Bakeoffs.