How can it be possible ? But meaning of
Performance Engineer is subjective as of now. Let’s try to break it. Performance
is a quality attribute which cannot be achieved in a SDLC phase. For assuring
Performance, you need many players in SDLC phases but you can’t call everyone
as Performance Engineers. We need architectural / design expert, UX designer, development
lead, performance tester, capacity planner, etc. to assure my digital product
performance & thereby user experience.
Performance Engineering is a
discipline that involves systematic practices, techniques & activities
during each phase of Software development life cycle (SDLC) to meet the
performance requirements. It strives to build performance standards by focusing
on the architecture, design & implementation choices.
Ideally speaking, performance being
one of the CTQ (Critical To Quality) attribute, it needs to be proactively
thought throughout the software development phases right from the requirements
phase till ongoing production maintenance. In this proactive mode, a Performance Development Engineer (who
is a solution architect with technology expertise aware of right architectural
& design pattern choices for system performance & scalability) should
be involved right from the initial SDLC phase to ensure system is build with
performance standards.
In a reactive mode, system
performance is not thought till end of implementation / functional testing phase
leading to reverse engineering of the digital product sometimes leading to
architectural/design level changes. In proactive or reactive mode, when a Performance Test Engineer tries to test
& assess the developed system for its performance & when SLAs are not
met, he performs a deep dive analysis on the specific layer(s) which doesn’t
meet the SLAs. In this case, depending upon the type & complexity of the bottleneck
being analyzed, deep dive analysis & tuning can be done by self or specialized
SMEs like DB architect, Websphere specialist, Network Engineer, etc can be
involved to analyze the performance issue in detail to provide tuning
recommendation. (Note: I hope we all accept the fact that a Performance Tester should
have the capability to test & assess the performance problems in the system
at all layers & report RCA findings whereas a Performance Engineer is an
experienced person who can be a technology expert with good bottleneck
analysis/tuning skills to provide recommendation for fixing the issue. But
ideally a sound Performance Tester upon gaining good experience develops the
skills of a Performance Engineer).
Gaining Clarity on the Contradict
Here comes the disagreement – If
you notice above, in both proactive & reactive modes, a Performance
Engineer is involved. But note, I have called the former as Performance
Development Engineer & later as Performance Test Engineer. The skills of a
Performance Development Engineer can be very different from that of Performance
Test Engineer.
But we need to remember, we can
have both Performance Development Engineer & Performance Test Engineer
available from the early SDLC phases as both are not duplicating the skills,
actually they are complimenting each other.
This is very similar to this scenario - Testing done by development team
(Unit Testing) & testing done by testing team (System Testing) has its own
objectives & advantages. They complement each other & try to find as
much defects as early to reduce the cost of fixing the defect.
I look at a Performance Test
Engineer to be a Performance Assurance Expert where (s)he need not be a
technology expert (building system with performance is the job of a Performance
Development Engineer), rather (s)he needs to look at the digital product from
all perspective to validate whether the digital product will create great user
experience by providing expected performance.
Apart from the knowledge of
various testing, monitoring & APM tools, (s)he need to be aware of technology
agnostic performance principles & know how to detect performance issues by
strategizing right type of performance tests with right workload model. With
thorough performance bottleneck analysis skills across all layers, need to have
matured thought-process on when my hardware will saturate/reach its thresholds
affecting the scalability (though may not be a capacity planning expert).
Hidden Track of Performance Engineering
Though Performance Engineering is
itself very broad, but still there is something that is hidden or forgotten. Hidden/Forgotten
I meant, it has not gained so much popularity comparatively & we don’t find
people easily with these skills very often.
Being the performance assurance
expert, Performance Engineer also needs to be capable of employing scientific/mathematical
principles to engineer various test activities (like verifying whether test or
workload is valid mathematically, forecast peak traffic hour workload, how to
map test results from low end environment to PROD hardware, etc), to perform
prediction or performance extrapolation, to bring in mathematical strategies to
model & validate the performance even before the system is completely
built, etc.
Generally speaking, with respect
to Test Competency, every Performance Tester aspires to become a Performance
Engineer, who is well versed in bottleneck analysis skills, profiling, tuning,
etc. But I have met very few Performance Testers who aspire to gain knowledge
on Queuing Theory principles to get into this hidden world of Performance
prediction, modeling & application capacity planning. This track is the base for the onset of high
end capacity planning tools & recent boom on Performance analytics &
Predictive/Prescriptive Modeling on Performance data. Many businesses are
having great demand for this skillset.
Performance Test Engineers need
to have plans to expand their knowledge on this space for having successful
& great learning career.
If you disagree, don’t forget to
share your point of view, for the benefit of Performance Testers/Engineers. Together
lets strive to create more awareness & remove any subjective usage of
the
terms & hold the torch on hidden tracks.
Happy Performance Testing &
Engineering!!
