Posts in Software Testing
Conned Again, Watson!
Whenever I attend a WOPR, testing guru Ross Collard always mentions how central math is to what performance testers do. I agree. Math is central to performance testing and testing. The problem is, I can never seem to remember any of it!

James Bach turned me on to a handy little pocket reference that I keep in my backpack, but while it's good for a reference, it doesn't do much to get me thinking like a mathematician. I found a great book that does just that. It's about math, and it's fun to read: Conned Again, Watson! Cautionary Tales of Logic, Math, and Probability by Colin Bruce

The book covers mathematical fallacy, logic, and lots of probability and statistics. It's a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories where Holmes and Watson solve math problems (one of the problems is a problem James Bach once gave me to solve). It's well written, fun to read, and you learn something that's useful at work. I highly recommend it for those who can't remember their college course of statistics (if you can you are a better learner then me...).
"...5 or 6 bullet points for a performance tester..."
A friend of mine sent me the following question the other day:

Can you give me 5 or 6 bullet points for a performance tester and what we need to tbe looking for when hiring a new person?


Attempting to honor his request for a short list (because I could very easily send a long list, here is what I came up with off the top of my head. Note the things that I would be willing to pay more for in terms of salary. If I didn't say based on salary, then the level I've indicated would required.




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

    • intermediate



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

    • intermediate to advanced based on salary



  3. Do they know math (probability and statistics)

    • intermediate to advanced based on salary



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

    • basic (they know where to find info and what questions to ask)



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

    • basic to advanced depending on salary



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

    • basic to advanced depending on salary





I know that many of you in the TestingReflections community are performance testers, and I was wondering how you might answer this same question. We had an interesting discussion about this topic at the last WOPR (during the SWOPRs).

Feel free to post below...