I do a sort of integration/stress test on a very large product (think operating-system size), and recently my team and I have been discussing ways to better organize our test workloads. Up until now, we've been content to have all of our (custom) workload applications in a series of batch-type jobs each of which represent a single stress-test run. Now that we're at a point where the average test run involves upwards of 100 workloads running across 13 systems, we think it's time to build something a little more advanced.
I've seen a lot out there about unit testing frameworks, but very little for higher-level stress type tests. Does anyone know of a common (or uncommon) way that the problem of managing large numbers of workloads is solved?
Right now we would like to keep a database of each individual workload and provide a front-end to mix and match them into test packages depending on what kind of stress we need on a given day, but we don't have any examples of the best way to do more advanced things like ranking the stress that each individual workload places on a system.
What are my fellow stress testers on large products doing? For us, a few handrolled scripts just won't cut it anymore.