Which of the following would provide the BEST stress testing environment taking under consideration and...

The best way to properly verify an application or system during a stress test would be to expose it to "live" data that has been sanitized to avoid exposing any sensitive information or Personally Identifiable Data (PII) while in a testing environment. Fabricated test data may not be as varied, complex or computationally demanding as "live" data. A production environment should never be used to test a product, as a production environment is one where the application or system is being put to commercial or operational use. It is a best practice to perform testing in a non-production environment.

Stress testing is carried out to ensure a system can cope with production workloads, but as it may be tested to destruction, a test environment should always be used to avoid damaging the production environment. Hence, testing should never take place in a production environment. If only test data is used, there is no certainty that the system was adequately stress tested.