A while ago I answered the following question on SearchSoftwareQuality.com’s Ask The Software Quality Expert: Questions & Answers.

Can you give me five or six bullet points for a performance tester and what we need to be looking for when hiring a new person?

Here is a clip from my answer:

1. Can they test (analysis skills, techniques, planning, etc.)?


2. Can they model (UCML, UML, various diagrams, concept modeling, etc.)?


3. Do they know math (probability and statistics)?


4. Do they know hardware, networks, and application servers (servers, routers, switches, JVMs, configurations, etc.) ?


5. Do they know tools (HTTP Spy, Etherial, LoadRunner, Robot, RPT, OpenSTA, etc.) ?


6. Can they code (not tool-code, but code-code)?

You can find the full posting here.

I wanted to review some of the books I had on performance testing, so I decided to share some of the results here. Specifically, I was looking for some taxonomies related to performance bugs, tests, and risks:

• Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications by Meier, Farre, Bansode, Barber, and Rea has an excellent chapter (Chapter 3) on performance test risks.


• Testing Computer Software by Kaner, Falk, and Nguyen has an Outline of Common Software Errors (Appendix A) that has a couple of issues related to performance.


• Testing Applications on the Web by Nguyen, Johnson, and Hackett has a chapter on performance testing (Chapter 19) which has some good lists. There's one on key factors that effect response time or performance, one on common hardware problems, one on common software problems, and a list for optimization considerations.


• While it probably wasn't intended for this use, I found that Appendix E on HTTP Response Codes in The Web Testing Companion by Lydia Ash gave me a lot of performance testing ideas. Appendix H also had a short but useful list for Performance questions.

Overall, I flipped through 14 hardback books. That was the best list I could come up with (which depressed me a bit - perhaps I have the wrong books, but I don't think so). After that, I went online and I was able to find the following:

• A Taxonomy of E-Commerce Risks and Failures by Vijayaraghavan (which includes an outline of FMEA).


• Similar to the previous paper, Bugs in the Brave New Unwired World: A Failure mode catalog of risks and bugs in mobile applications by Jha and Kaner has a lot of items that relate to performance.


• A really good performance testing risk taxonomy on Roland Stens' site.


• A less directly related, but no less helpful, reference that I always use (even when performance testing) is Bach's Heuristic Test Strategy Model.

I be interested in knowing about some taxonomies I may have missed. I'm looking specifically for performance defects and/or risks, but I'm fairly good at transferring from material that's similar but not directly related.