Remote exploration of functionalities is one of the things I enjoy in load testing. I don’t like the definition as “non-functional” though. “Para-functional” sounds better, but (at least for me) thinking of those functionalities as system or service functionalities helps to assess them from purpose/value/risks perspectives.

You can’t reach them manually, you can’t even see them, and yet it’s purely an exploratory functional testing activity. The generation of load on the system here plays a role of a trigger. It’s not really about performance characteristics, like throughput or response time. It is an investigation of how the entire system behaves under load conditions, and finding out where this behavior goes weird.

The mindmap I created is for a “big picture view”. It does not necessary mean that testing should be conducted in a component-by-component manner, or through reverse engineering of an infrastructure. It represents nodes of a chain; each node might have its own weakness and impact on the behavior of a system.

(Click on the picture to view it in a separate browser window)