Last edited 15 Apr 2022

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CIOB Institute / association Website

Stress test

The CIOB Planning Protocol 2021 (CIOB PP21), a technical information sheet published by the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) in February 2021, defines a stress test as: ‘a series of tests to be applied to a programme in order to assess the quality of it.’

--CIOB

NB Anticipate, react, recover; Resilient infrastructure systems, published by the National Infrastructure Commission in May 2020, defines stress testing as: ‘Testing a representation or simulation of a system to reveal its performance under certain conditions or to reveal the conditions that could lead to failure.’

The glossary of statistical terms, published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), defines a stress test as: ‘…a “what if” scenario that takes the world as given but assumes a major change in one or more variables in order to see what effect this would have on various indicators. For instance, for an economy, the impact on growth, inflation, and external debt of a huge change in oil prices could be considered. Stress tests are particularly useful for financial institutions: for instance, an individual entity might consider the impact on net worth of a sharp movement in financial market prices, in order to help determine the appropriate level of capital to hold.’

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