Is Performance testing skill is specialized ?

[Anaz Mohamed]

Hey Folks,

Hmmm this i have a diffrent question to all of you, one of my friend
asked me this question

Does "Performance testing (loadrunner etc ..)" is considered as
specialized knowledge or skill whatever you call for L1B visa categroy

Since now a days L1's are rejected like crazy under this category
(specialized knowledge)

Eventough many of you think this is not a right forem to ask this
question since it dosn't directly relate to performance testing an
application, I say but still it is related to performance testing
skill

My guess :)

Please do share you thoughts !

--
Regards,
Anaz

[Krishnakanth PPS]

Yes it is.

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[James Pulley]

Performance testing, when engaged in correctly, requires an individual or
group of individuals with high specialized, high-differentiated,
non-commoditized skill sets. For most Resumes/CVs that are presented, the
candidates do not possess the mix of tool or non-tool skills to be
successful. The ratio of successful to non-successful candidates with some
level of documentation on their Resumes/CVs is in the area of 1:30 for web
skills only and can rise to close to 1:200 for some very rare protocols.

Most outsource vendors fail to recognize the specialized skills required to
be successful with this discipline and simply randomly select new hires and
apply the label "performunz testur" to them. This is a failure on the part
of management to recognize specific foundation skills that are critical and
such skills should be interviewed for and selected out for development.
This behavior is compounded by companies that fail to provide tool and
process training or a professional development path for performance testers.
Even plumber and electrician guilds have a more refined view of professional
development than do most outsource performance testing firms with people
progressing through trainee, journeyman and master levels, with each coming
and increase in both experience and skill.

The mass number of low quality people with performance testing as their
label have distorted the market in the past decade quite heavily. For the
past ten years the size of the performance testing market need has been
increasing, but the number of truly skilled individuals has not been able to
keep up. However compensation rates per hour and salary have been dropping
like a rock. This is an odd situation economically, as you would expect
with demand increasing faster than supply that rates would at least be
stable if not rise. My economist buddies tell me that this only happens in
an expanding need market when the number of low quality, low differentiated,
low value resources so overwhelms the market that the consumer simply is
unwilling to pay for effective skills for fear of getting burned at the
higher rate.

James Pulley, http://www.loadrunnewrbythehour.com/PricingMatrix

Hey Folks,

My guess :)

--
Regards,
Anaz

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[John Crunk]

Performance testing is a highly specialized field that requires knowledge in a vast number of areas. You don't just wake up one day and start doing performance testing. It requires years of study and hard work to develop the skill. There are no shortcuts or easy routes.

On a personal note to those that choose the easy route and not to do the real studying. You are an insult to the rest of performance testers. You know who you are! You are the ones that will take offense to this statement and will tell me to shutup.

If you are even thinking it, you may still be in this category. Everyone has talents and if yours is not performance testing now, that doesn't mean you can't be one someday if that is what you want. It just means you have a lot of work and studying to do.

Thanks

Dr. John Crunk

Sent from my iPhone

[Sasank]

If I were in the position to select/reject L1 for performance Testers, I should have highly specialized performance tester in place to interview the applicants who quoted they are really specialized in performance testing and seeking L1 

Then atleast the market rates have been upto the mark.Guys what do you say?

[chaitanya bhatt]

>On Fri, Dec 10, 2010 at 8:57 PM, James Pulley ><loadrunn...@jamespulley.com> wrote:
>For the past ten years the size of the performance testing >market need has been increasing, but the number of truly >skilled individuals has not been able to  keep up.

Blame all the big fat IT corporations like IBM, HP, Accenture, TCS, Wipro etc for contributing significantly to this problem. These companies are the key contributors to the talent pool of IT industry and they have committed a pathetic job in maintaining a decent technical hygiene level of resources in the market. I have seen the recruitment process of many of these companies and I must say it is nothing less gross than bull crap! These organizations just care about numbers and nothing else. They hardly conduct more than one technical round before recruiting and even this would sometime be only a telephonic round! And needless to say,  their training programs are a joke!

Ironically, the second contributors to this problem are the clients. Clients seldom have good in-house technical professionals who understand niche domains like PT. As a result of which, a shoddy job committed by a service provider often gets unnoticed. This kinda creates a negative synergy which weakens the system from its core.

Its hight time companies start taking responsibility and think about long term success than worrying about short term relief.

-Chaitanya M Bhatt
http://www.performancecompetence.com

[V.M.GURU PRASATH]

Performance testing is a Specialized skill. No one can become a performance tester in a day. Even after 10 years of experience if someone says I knew everything in performance testing. Then it is a false statement.

A performance tester should keep on updating his skill set.

Phew! That said but performance testing is a pleasure to work. When you identify the bottleneck and itz solution you feel as if you are on top of the world. Do good performance testing and enjoy for yourself the joy of specialized skill set called performance testing.

Regards,

V.M.Guruprasath

[snehamoy]

Big fat IT corps are there to create opportunities’...small fat   IT corps now have to gain on this 2 materialize their dream    

[Gaz Davidson]

On Dec 10, 5:30 pm, chaitanya bhatt <bhatt.chaita...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Blame all the big fat IT corporations like IBM, HP, Accenture, TCS, Wipro
> etc for contributing significantly to this problem. These companies are the
> key contributors to the talent pool of IT industry and they have committed a
> pathetic job in maintaining a decent technical hygiene level of resources in
> the market. I have seen the recruitment process of many of these companies
> and I must say it is nothing less gross than bull crap! These organizations
> just care about numbers and nothing else.

Blame the huge, wasteful government contracts where the corporation
gets paid per number of butts on seats. The winning formulae appears
to be:

* Put 5 unskilled idiots on a job that one skilled person could do
with their eyes shut
* Give them three months to do it instead of three weeks
* Pay them 15% of what you charge for them instead of 85%

Paying for skilled professionals may cost the client less than 10%,
but where's the profit in that?

[snehamoy]

This big FAT guys maintain a weird policy and they always try to put the
available resource in any work rather than seeing their skills and try to
build on it.
So what happens is a performance tester can be working in manual testing for
next assignment and so after that the knowledge gained by doing performance
testing is totally lost...he is same as a newbie!

-----Original Message-----
From: lr-loa...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lr-loa...@googlegroups.com]

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[James Pulley]

All olf the govt contracts I have worked on generally dictate green card of us citizen only and have tended to have a quite high technical requirement of the performance team, something which has run counter to the commercial market trend. Offshore outsourcing where taxpayer dollars are involvedx also tends to create political problems for elected officials that most would rather avoid.

Now,I have seen a trend towards trying to pay offshore or h rates for such work, but once you point out the supply problem of finding a capable green card or citizen to actually be successful in the role the rate isssue goes away (because they are already seeing the truth in the resumes received).

[Krishnakanth PPS]

James 

I doubt if you would ever see beyond the outsourcing spectacle. 

I am sure you own a IPhone. Throw it away because it is assembled in China to where manufacturing is outsourced.

I am not neither capable nor inclined to reply to your long thoughtfully churned emails that talk only about the outsourcing companies, but I am absolutely confident that in your life time we would have people from your country coming to outsourced locations for jobs. 

I believe you are very talented, lucky and at the right place at the right time because of which you believe that you are the best. 

There are people who are better than you, but are born at places not so great and hence can't better than you.

I do not condone those people who put fake stuff in their resumes, but I feel absolutely degrading when you generalize such thing saying they come from one particular country.

I know that I am not such a talented person to detune your mind from such things, but I am sure you would get a reply which you would see in your life time.

Thanks.

Krishna Kanth

[James Pulley]

There are poorly skilled domestic outsource partners.  There are highly skilled offshore outsource partners.   Geography does not define capability, only a willingness to excel governs that.   Quality does have a price and has been noted before that when accounting for capability rates do not differ all that much from Boston to Bejing to Berlin to Bangalore.   I have a California company that pesters me constantly about their highly skilled LoadRunner personnel at 10-12 dollars per hour US.   This is despite interviews from my team which showed that their personnel are completely without usable skills.   I cannot speak for other markets but the offshore firms and H visa holders so dominate the QA space that it has altered the expectations on the part of consumers for both rates and technical skills, to the lesser of both.   This has lead to a decline in both quality and the respect for the performance profession.    I choose to be a naked voice in the wilderness to fight against this trend towards poor quality deliverables in a quality based profession.

 

I was very fortunate to have worked alongside titans of old when I began my career with Mercury.   Some are these individuals are still around, most have left the industry for various reasons.   When I left Mercury I was appalled at the lack of skills of people who were attempting to be successful with LoadRunner and I began to give back, free from the restrictions imposed from having a vendor attached to my posts.   That was ten years ago.   The same questions that dominated then still dominate today.  The level of training and skill overall has declined even from the level it was at ten years ago.   I have been fortunate to have seen a wider breadth and depth of the tool than many, but I will always be a student of the tool and the profession….much as any serious professional remains forever a student of their work, from accountants to engineers, from lawyers to doctors.   I am fortunate that my skills have allowed me to solve very complex problems in performance, but compared to the titans I will always be in their shadows.  I have my own set of “go to” people when I get trapped in a rabbit hole and need a different perspective.   You’re right, I am probably not the best, but I am cagey and stubbornly refuse to give up on technical issues.   That usually beats out the best which either get bored or frustrated.  ;)

 

Oh, and I don’t own an I phone, but I did just recently switch from Blackberry to Android.  (I did look for a USA built phone but the only one I could find was a milspec one that you could freeze, burn, etc… and it was over 1200 USD – too much for me)   Per my last email, H visa holders come from all over to the USA and cannot be tied to one particular country.  Outsourcing models I have run up against include dozens of countries from different areas of the world, from Indonesia to China, to Vietnam, to the Philippines to India to Costa Rica to Canada to the USA to a half a dozen republics in the former soviet union.   Where the companies involved lead not on quality & efficiency but on price alone the issues that surround their delivery are pretty uniform no matter where the company or person is based.

 

I should point out that I owe a substantial portion of my living to outsourcing and as a general concept I support specialization for increased quality and efficiency.   However the working model of most outsourcers emphasizes not quality but price, specialization based upon skill is not prevalent and efficiency suffers incredibly.  Training and Professional Development are non-existent.   Quality suffers.   The reputation of QA in general and performance QA in specific suffers.   The value delivered to the client is low.   Rates follow value.   I am an advocate for standards for market participants, for trade associations/guilds to set these standards and to educate consumers about the benefits to them of people and organizations which adhere to such standards.   I am an advocate for following the path of Stone Masons, Artists, Plumbers, Electricians, Lawyers, Doctors, Engineers, Project Managers (PMP), Security Professionals (CISSP), even Insurance Agents, to come together for the benefit of the consumer and the overall health of the community.   Raise the actual value of the participants.  Raise the actual value of the deliverable to the clients.   Raise the value of the profession.  Quality improves.  Rates follow value and all benefit.

 

As I see it, if you are in this profession and you have a problem with the state of the profession you have three options:

 

(1)    Accept the status quo

(2)    Leave

(3)    Change the terms of the discussion & Fight for higher quality and better value to the end consumer of our profession.

 

I choose to fight for higher quality, higher value and better respect for the performance quality assurance profession.

 

James Pulley

Performance Engineering Student since 1991

http://www.loadrunnerbythehour.com/PricingMatrix

 

From: lr-loa...@googlegroups.com [mailto:lr-loa...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Krishnakanth PPS
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2010 5:46 AM
To: lr-loa...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Is Performance testing skill is specialized ?

 

James 

[Anaz Mohamed]

Guys guys

Never mind! take it easy.... we are here for mutual knowledge
sharing(not anything more than that I guess)

Hey All

It was overwhelming great response thanks alot for your response here,
all your response added it's own value

I just wanna tell something here in my company we have separate
performance testing center of execellence were 500 memebers work in
different project these people are only engaged in PT alone here from
scracth is thought to resorces from training with the tool to
understanding the testing environment,App servers, DB servers MQ's
analyzing log files etc......performance testing concepts to
performance engineering.That is shortest way to put it ..... it's
Cognizant in India ( Actually I am not advertising it here )

Just let us close this thread

Thanks again

On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 5:32 PM, James Pulley

--
Regards,
Anaz