During Performance testing, stress test has its own place to find out the uppercut of application capability. But what is the approach you should follow to conduct Stress and then conclude the result? Kirk Pepperdine has articulated these stuff very well in his article.
Stress Test: The main idea behind stress testing is to determine the failure of the system. Stress testing is a kind of negative testing where we load the software with a large number of concurrent users/processes which cannot be handled by the systems hardware resources. This testing is also known as Fatigue testing. It puts greater emphasis on robustness, availability, and error handling under a heavy load, rather than on what would be considered correct behaviour under normal circumstances.