Every 2 years or so I find myself building/ramping up a performance engineering team. And every time I have a hard time finding people with engineering skills. Both in India and outside. Majority of the people have skills limited to black box testing. However, there is a high level of enthusiasm among these individuals to move into deeper tech roles. They often lack direction/guidance for achieving this . This has prompted me to write this essay.

So how does someone in a vanilla Performance Tester(or even QA) role start moving deeper in the field of performance? I made this transition several years back. Like a lot of the folks reading this, I was in services/consulting role. I hope I can relate to most of the challenges that you face today.

What this is not: This is not an exhaustive “How to become a performance engineer” guide. There are lot of topics which I have not covered in this. The intent of this essay is to just get you started.

These are only guidelines. And YMMV.

I have structured the content into 3 parts:

Part - I: Approach Shift: This part talks about how you should start positioning yourself in projects for a 3-5 year growth trajectory(may be even beyond) towards performance engineering. Read More …

Part - II: Tactical Challenges: Here I try to address most of the tactical/day-to-day challenges that performance testers face in their projects. I draw these points mostly from my experience and from my conversations with performance engineering aspirants. Read More …

Part - III: Learning Path: In this part I cover how you can start building your framework for continuous learning. This should help you continue to learn over years as you mature into a performance architect. Read More…