Comparing Performance Testing and Performance Engineering

Do Performance Engineers and Performance Testers perform the same role?

Some of the responsibilities of a Performance Testers is to build the automation suites and design and execute Test Strategies.

Whereas, a Performance Engineer has the in-depth expertise to fix bottlenecks which are related to performance. PE has knowledge of infrastructure and development components, assisting them to provide code reviews, investigating environment configurations, reviewing performance best practices, etc.

>>>Some of the Performance Engineering Objectives are below:

1- Eliminate late system deployment.
2- Eliminate avoidable system rework due to performance issues.
3- Increase business revenue by ensuring the system can process within timeframe.
4- Eliminate avoidable system tuning efforts.
5- Identify future bottlenecks.
6- Avoid unnecessary hardware acquisition costs.
7- Reduce software maintenance costs caused due to performance problems and software impacted by ad hoc performance fixes.
8- Increase capability of server.

Performance Tester's role is to discover and report performance defects which are not according to the requirements. The true definition of a Tester is someone who raises defects which are not according to the requirements and then hand it over to the development team which then becomes their problem to solve. Their responsibility as a Performance Tester is only focused on delivering a performance quality management solution. This is where the Performance Engineer comes in. They analyze the outputs of the test metrics and provide solutions to the development team to ensure performance problems are resolved in time.

Performance Testers are expected to have knowledge and expertise of Performance Test domain best practices and also have the expertise in resolving and remediating performance defects via engineering initiatives.

For a Performance program to achieve best results a performance team must be compromised of both Performance Testing and Performance Engineering disciplines. To deliver successful performance programs these two roles must work closely together in a performance team, with one supplying the testing methodologies/artifacts and the other analyzing such results from the testing to determine and remediate the performance defects.