This article is also published in WOMEN TESTERS – APRIL 2016 EDITION
http://www.womentesters.com/2016/04/
Introduction
With the onset of SMAC (Social, Media, Analytics and Cloud)
technologies& Digital transformations, there is an exponential increase in
the level of knowledge expected from Performance Testers & Engineers. There
has been a sudden increase in the number of vendors providing various
application performance management tools to satisfy the growing demand on quick
performance insights as high performance is one of the key factors driving the
technological revolution. As Performance Engineering focuses on building systems
with high performance and performing tuning & optimization to meet the
performance, scalability & capacity demands, Performance Testers are
usually seen inclined to have their career path towards Performance
Engineering.
This emerging trend in the rise of various performance testing
&engineering toolsets for quick performance analysis &easy bottleneck
detection has led to a confusing trend withinPerformance Testing/Engineering
community. The upcoming millennials seem
to have developed more interest to get their hands on various tools rather than
focusing on deepening their concepts &developing thought process for
systematic performance problem diagnosis &tuning. This trend is creating a
very big challenge for Performance COE’s (Center Of Excellence) as they strive
towards successful project delivery in environments where these savvy tools don’t
exists.
Tools are just Enablers; Don’t forget to add
your Intelligence
The primary skills for Performance Testers is to design &
execute various types of performance tests using variety of tools like HP Load
Runner or JMeter. Performance Engineers through their vast performance testing
experience for years or from developmental background have built stronger
credibility as they understand the problems in application performance
management including building scalable architecture solutions, selecting right
design patterns that enhances performance, code profiling, etc. slightly better
& know the areas to be analysed to identify the root cause of the problems
when a performance SLA is not met.
Even now, a good performance tester is expected to have HP
LoadRunner tool certification. There are no tool agnostic courses for acquiring
performance testing capability. Due to which performance testers are usually seem
biased & inclined towards specific tool terminologies & concepts. Majority
of them think Performance testing is all about developing test scripts for the requested
business use cases and create test scenario in the tool to execute load tests
for the expected load conditions.
Performance Testers should firstly know how to strategize the tests,
it’s not about just conducting load test or stress test using a tool.The key
value adds in performance testing on how to bring in better accuracy & real
time end user simulation in the performance tests, etc. Your favourite
performance testing tool do not have the intelligence to report if the workload
(use cases & load distribution) used for the test is incorrectly modelled.
Many testers seem to be very comfortable with the knowledge of various tool
specific settings without knowing the fact that a wrongly configured think time
can end up running a completely wrong testnot even worth doing performance
testing for your application.Majority of the production failure RCAs (root
cause analysis) revealed improper & inaccurate performance tests due to incorrect
design of the workload or improper NFRs used during validation tests.
The Performance testers should think beyond the performance
testing tool & focus on gaining stronger understanding of the underlying
Performance Testing & Engineering concepts to be able to run accurate &
meaningful performance tests.
In recent past, there has been a sudden rise in the popularity of
various commercial APM (Application Performance Monitoring) tools like Dynatrace,
AppDynamics, New Relic, etc., while these tools have helped in quick & easy
performance problem detection providing productivity boom due to lot of
performance problem insights & readymade analysis recommendations in few
button clicks, it is unfortunate that it has created a situation where
Performance Testers /Engineers are more biased to gain experience on these
tools rather than understanding the problem analysis concepts & principles.
The Performance Engineers we could find these days also have got biased
to tool terminologies and tool provided metrics losing the big picture on
overall application performance management & 360 degree of problem
analysis. This lack of understanding in some cases have caused great
embarrassments during project delivery. But I must agree the fact that these
new generation tools are a great tribute for Performance Engineers & have
brought our performance bottleneck analysis efforts from weeks to days thereby
giving us room to fix it up quickly before it impacts the end user.
The bottom line fact is that there is no substitute for
understanding of processes & Performance testing & Engineering
concepts/principles which is required for managing performance throughout the
SDLC life cycle phases. Gaining knowledge of the tools is important but not to
be considered as a substitute for all the underlying performance testing/engineering
principles.
Tools are not an evil. They are great weapons to address the
problem quickly. It’s just our perception to use them as enablers needs to be
improved & we need to continue focusing on underlying Performance
Testing/Engineering principles.
