When conducting CTOD test, especially in thick welded steel plate, fatigue pre-cracking occasionally failed to satisfy the requirements of standards thus making the test result invalid. Internally accumulated residual stress of test piece has been thought as one of the main reasons. The propagation of fatigue crack, started from the tip of machined notch, which might have propagated irregularly due to residual stress field. To overcome this kind of difficulty three methods to modify the residual stress are suggested in standard i.e. local compression, reverse bending and stepwise high-R ratio method. In this paper not only multi pass welding but also local pre-compressing process of thick steel plate has been simulated using finite element method for clarifying variation of internal welding residual stress. The simulated results show that welding residual stress is compressive in the middle section of the model and it is predominantly increased after machining the specimen. Comparing as-welded state all component of the welding residual stress changing to compressive in the tip of machine notch whereas residual stress of the outer area remain as tensile condition relatively. Analysis results also show that this irregular residual stress distribution is improved to be more uniformly by applying local compression.