What does "stress testing" evaluate?

Stress testing evaluates how a system behaves under extreme conditions, which is essential to determine the system's robustness and capacity to handle unexpected situations or loads. This type of testing is crucial for identifying the breaking points of a system, isolating vulnerabilities, and ensuring that the system can maintain its functionality even when subjected to pressures such as high user load, insufficient resources, or unexpected failures. By applying extreme scenarios during testing, developers and engineers gain insights into the system's resilience and can enhance it accordingly, ensuring reliability in real-world applications where stress is inevitable.

The other options focus on aspects that are not the primary focus of stress testing. For instance, evaluating a system under minimal resources is more aligned with testing its efficiency rather than its limits. Usability testing concentrates on how user-friendly and functional a system is under normal conditions. Security protocols are assessed through different approaches, such as penetration testing, rather than through stress testing.