A method for efficiently stress testing a service oriented architecture based application. A business process flow is recorded between a client and a server. When an XML document is extracted from the recorded business process flow, an XML document file is created for the extracted XML document, an XML document descriptor file is created comprising XPath queries for data elements in the XML document file, a configuration file is created comprising user input parameters obtained from the recorded business process flow, and test input data file is created. The user input parameters in the configuration file are used to generate a test script to test the service oriented architecture based application, wherein data values from the test input data file are inserted into a template of the XML document file at locations specified by the XPath queries in the XML document descriptor file. The test script is then executed.