Someone from the performance testing community shared today in Twitter that the effectiveness of the performance test engineers as well as the performance testing tools in identifying the root causes of performance issues have gone down. It is a serious concern, and I thought we could look at it from an industry perspective. This issue is not just with performance testing; I have seen it generally with all the Software Testing areas.
Recruitment Nightmare
When recruitment for a position is done in Software Engineering, and specifically in Software Testing, much emphasis is given on filtering resumes that have the relevant keywords. In case of testing, the keywords are mostly about the testing tools. Testing tools are helpful in assisting the testing practitioner in testing, but the hiring scenario in Software Testing has become such that tools are considered to be primarily important and not much emphasis is given to basics of Software Testing, methodologies, ways of testing, etc. Most of the times, the hiring person does not know about the technical requirements of the position that is being filled, and just go by the keywords given to them by the engineering. This eventually leads to resumes being filled with keywords that are in demand so that candidates can get the job. The candidates may know the tools that are listed in the resume, but they would lack the knowledge of Software Testing and how to go about it.
The same is applicable to performance testing. As the quality of performance test engineers get degraded because they don’t know the basics of performance engineering and performance testing, eventually, it also influences the tools and tool makers, and the tools also become incapable in identifying performance issues effectively.
What Can Be Done?
One thing that can be done is for subject matter expects getting into educating the community. This is a humongous task as the community is huge. The other possibility is for organisations to place more emphasis on the basic concepts of Software Testing and performance testing in the hiring process and reduce the importance of tools keywords. Of course, if the engineer does not know the basics of what is being tested, any tool knowledge that they have is not going to help. If organisations keep this in mind while hiring, the quality of the test engineers would improve.
Feel free to chat with me on Software Testing competency aspects.