"Performance testing is the determining factor to conclude the effectiveness of the application. Also, this factor can improve the scalability, speed, and stability of the application. However, to excel in this testing process, it is important to have a skilled performance test engineer who can build an efficient performance testing strategy. Considering this, it is essential for enterprises to hire an engineer who has exceptional knowledge and skills to become a successful performance test engineer and as well as to upgrade the quality of the application"

Scalability, Stability, and Endurance are important requirements to ensure the quality of applications. This can be achieved when testers include performance testing in their software testing methodology. However, to achieve quality results with performance testing, it is crucial for the test engineers to hold certain skill requirements.

By having significant performance testing skills, engineers can easily practice performance testing and achieve success. Hence, while allotting teams to practice performance testing, enterprises need to validate their skills and then consider them for performance testing.

Top 6 Technical Skills of a Performance Test Engineer

Skills to understand the User-behavior: Understanding the behavior of users is one of the important skills for a performance tester. This factor cannot be expected, as it may vary. Hence, testers should be capable to write the performance test scripts by understanding the business, product, about the marketing strategy, and the user scenarios completely. This way of understanding helps them to expect the workload, behavior of the users at peak time, etc. Hence, the performance test engineer should be able to gather the required statistics that help in understanding user behavior.

Skills to communicate with teams: Performance testers should have good communication skills because this will help them to interact and as well as to build a good team. Also, it is essential for them to have good communication with clients, stakeholders, project team members, and the development team so that it becomes easier to report the issue and fix them at the earliest.

Skills to manage the project: Maintenance of performance has become a continuous requirement to scale production. Also, this is no longer a one-time requirement, it is integrated into the continuous development cycle. This way of managing the project’s performance throughout the entire life cycle is an important skill for a performance tester.

Sufficient Domain Experience: Experience is one of the important factors for qualified performance tester. The qualified professional will have a good experience in development, web security, and management backgrounds; and this can be achieved when the tester is having good domain experience.

Skills on CSS and XPath Selectors: For performance testers, CSS and XPath Selector is a widely used concept. When dealing with HTTP requests and validating data during its response, performance testers make use of CSS and XPath Selectors to validate the data from the response and to build another request. Having sufficient knowledge with this skill can help them to think about the other ways of extracting when this doesn’t work.

Skills to write Scripts: There is a range of performance testing tools with different features and various supporting languages. Hence, it is essential to have scripting skills for building load tests on various tools. This is a booster as the tester can easily build the required tests on any performance testing tool.

Conclusion:

The need for performance testing is tremendously increasing and it will be evolved in the future too. Hence, to scale the best benefits with performance testing, it is important for enterprises to hire a skilled performance test engineer or leverage performance testing services from a next-gen testing services provider.

About the Author:

I am a technical content writer, interested in writing articles on the latest IT related topics. In this article, I tried to share the needful skills for being a quality performance test engineer.