Being / Becoming a Performance Tester

If you wanted to become a performance tester or make your career in performance testing, below are the important characteristics that you need to have:

Common Sense and observation

There are several jobs which do not require applying common sense or minute observation skills. But Performance testing is not definitely one of those. You should have lot of observation as well as common sense.

Jump into the shoes of others:

The performance testing job expects you think from the various perspectives like from the customer / end user point of view, from the business point of view / from the application / technology point of view etc.  While automating the use cases you should think from the end user perspective. When providing a performance test report, you should ensure that the report can be understood for the business analysts as well as the one who owns the entire business. While analyzing the root causes for the performance issues, you should imagine yourself as a technologist.

Willingness to Learn:

Learning performance testing is not one time activity, though the basics remain the same. With the new technologies emerging pretty quickly, as a performance tester you should upgrade yourself to the new technologies and understand the core of them. Continuous learning is the one vital factor that makes a performance tester career prolonged.

The above said are the basic things needed. However, to start your career as a performance tester below is the technical stuff that you should have at least basic understanding about

Operating systems: How operating systems work, the CPU scheduling, memory management, disk management etc

Databases: The tables, queries, joins and indexes and how a query is executed

Computer networks: How the communication between the client and server happens, the TCP, UDP communications, HTTP

Web Application architecture and browser properties: Web, App and DB Servers, the way they work, some important features of web applications like session ID, cookies, request methods and response

Any programming language – You should be good in writing the basic programs with any one programming language

So, if you are considering a career in performance testing, ensure you have all the above said requirements met.