Just for clarity, the stress test I have written steadily increases the load on the system until it reaches a breaking point. It theoretically runs indefinitely, but as the system resources are finite, it is expected to fail after some point of time. I have an expected load for the system, but this is tested separately in a load test. The purpose of this stress test is to find out how much load I can put on the system before I need to implement scaling.I'm in the process of writing a stress test for a system, and I'm wondering whether it makes sense to have pass/fail criteria. By nature of the test, the load steadily increases until it hits a breaking point (i.e. it fails). I obviously don't know what this breaking point is beforehand, and therefore no expectation of the load the system can handle (in theory anyway).Now I do have other performance tests to test the system under an expected load etc., which I can easily set pass/fail criteria for, and I could use these criteria as a basis for my stress test. In other words, I could set a minimum baseline for my stress test to reach, but I'm not sure if this is the right thing to do (is this 'duplicating' my other test?).I'm hoping someone with more experience in performance testing can help me out here. What pass/fail criteria have others used when stress testing (if any)? 
Is it reasonable to not have pass/fail criteria for a stress test
testing;stress testing
In a stress test your job is not to define the stress the subject should be able to take.  It's to measure the stress it takes before it fails.You can use the performance criteria to define what a stress failure is.  But the result of a stress test isn't pass/fail.  It's failed after 90 hours under 100% utilization with ventilation 50% compromised.