Rahul Kumar Singh – Performance Engineering Interview

Name – Rahul Kumar Singh

Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kiruh/

Intro

As Steve McConnell rightly said – “It’s hard enough to find an error in your code when you’re looking for it; it’s even harder when you’ve assumed your code is error-free.”

Today we have with us Mr. Rahul Singh with an extensive experience in Software Engineering and Performance Testing.

He is an engineering graduate in Electronics and Communication from MLV Government Textile & Engineering College and also completed his MBA from BITS, PILANI

He has worked in senior capacities in diverse industries as Software Test Engineer and presently working in Oracle as a Senior Performance Engineer.

With his vast experience and diverse skill set, we wish to learn more about his career trajectory and learning experiences.

We welcome you sir to this interview series and hope you have a good time ahead.

List of Interview Questions –

1. Can you share more about your journey and why did you choose this field?

I am from Bihar, a district called Khagaria. I did my schooling from khagaria and later i came to Patna for IIT preparation. Then I got selected for MLB Govt _ & Engineering college through AIEEE rank. I did my engineering there. So i am 2015 pass out and got placed from college itself. Then i moved to Bengaluru. I joined Tyson Foods as performance engineer. This is how it started. I wasn’t aware of the _ any job in the industry. But first time i joined as a java developer but later on there was a requirement of performance testing and engineering.

They provided me with the training, from where my journey actually bloomed. Later i started_ financial services, NSL hub, bank affirmation and now Auricle. This is a 7 year long journey where i have learnt a lot about performance testing and also utilized my skillset. So this is how i started my career in performance testing.

2. What is performance testing and how is it relevant in the new age of software development paradigms?

Performance testing is nothing but non- functional testing where we are resoluting our system in terms of non functional. Like what is the working of CPU, memory, network related performance. Basically everything is about response time, how responsive is the application. That is performance testing. In simpler and shorter terms performance testing is checking the performance of any application under the load and stress and in that situation reviewing the behavior of that application.

For example we make a big car like Ferrari, everything is perfect including looks and design but at the end performance turns out not be satisfactory. It can travel like up to 500kms/hr. While doing observations, we observe that if a car is going at a speed of 100, automatically car behaves abnormal. There is no control over steering. Making noises. That way we can say, car is good including costs and everything but performance isn’t. It makes all other applications irrelevant.

Even in software of any industry, if everything is good but performance isn’t, that item/product is of no use. That is performance testing.

3. How would you select a test case for performance testing?

When we talk about performance testing, that is related to non-functional, we are not going to bother about manual or automation tester. For performance, we will take those scenarios which have more traffic. Let’s say, in Gmail, there is more of a flow scenario. People will login and either check email or replay it. Secondly, they will login it and they will create an email and send it, then log out. This is the major kind of scenario in Gmail. So user pattern is one of criteria for selection.

Even we have one more criteria. Let’s say i worked in a banking domain, where there’s one functionality of payment. I was working for global _ banking, there was less kind of user. But if there are more users, we are qualifying it for the testing. But here what we did was, there were less users, but premium users. Premium terms in terms of more transaction. Like if 1000 people are doing transaction and they are making 1000 million dollars. But here is only 1 user who is making 1000 million dollar alone.

This implies this 1 client is equal 1000 users. And then we take flow also as a performance kind of criteria. Since loosing a user like that will be a great loss. Such a loss will result in value of business leading to losses. If there is any kind of loss in the business, that time we can do performance. Therefore, we consider premium account holder user, otherwise if there are more users, those could be considered too.

4. What are the most common tools for performance testing—open source or proprietary?

First we’ll take up J-meter. It is more of a market ruler tool now a days in the industry. Almost all the organizations at all the levels including startups are using J-meter. That is completely open source and lightweight kind of software. You can download it from website and start using. It is very to use and could be used by fresher too.

Secondly, it is honorer from Micro focus. Till 50 user it is totally free. Almost all big organization related to fintech are using paid version kind of this tool. It is a very good tool to use. These are the two major tools needed for a person who wish to enter performance testing domain.

5. Which test management tool is suitable for performance testing?

If you go for low runner, they are providing alm integration, there you can manage all the test suite, script and everything. Even we have a tool named performance enter. Majorly projects are related to micro focus only. Micro focus is actually a product acquired from HP. In performance enter you can upload all the test cases and calling like script too from there only you can design a scenario. It will even generate a report for you to download. E

Even we have tools like blaze meter and astro runner. Astro runner is again from micro focus. If you want to go for cloud based performance testing, in terms of load generation, you can go for blaze meter and then take load generator from geographical location and check performance of the system.

6. What are the opportunities available in performance testing in the coming five years?

If i talk about opportunities, what i observed in my case was even the people who were close to me in terms of friends and family, there is huge requirement in the market. Earlier people were not aware, even company had much knowledge about performance. Those who had knowledge, there wasn’t good framework, where performance testing could be performed. Slowly, we had open source, paid version of these tools, with lots of support mechanism. Now most of the company uses it and offers a high pay as well.

If i compare the salary of performance, it will be somehow be equal to tester developer. If you are a good performance engineer, first working in 3-4 years, then slowly they can take up things and reach heights. Once anyone can start performance engineering, from there _will be stronger than developer and tester. And then would start getting huge packages offer similar to architect. Because we are closely related to it.

There is huge scope for performance tester and engineer. But you need to start from performance tester and eventually go to being an engineer and then architect.

7. What is your advice for freshers who wish to get into this field?

Firstly i would welcome whoever enter our field or domain. First of all freshers should get a job, any job related to software. Either tester, or developer or anything related to software. Once he gains an experience then he can learn for performance testing, and then slowly move towards performance engineer. Because for performance engineer, one should have a vast knowledge about coding, java, python. It would include all testing like manual or automation, performance testing, API testing, database testing.

Again one should have good knowledge about CI/CD with DevOps. CI/CD means you need to create pipelines like we have genkins, APM tool, ____, you should have very good knowledge about DV query. At least milestone query DV and all. Then, __ because in the industry everyone work son this server. Network related knowledge is equally important too. How OS, Network,____,___ is working. Those knowledge will be not only an overview but in depth it is required.

So i would suggest start from 0, then add skills to your resume and become a performance engineer. Every step needs to be given enough time.

We thank him for giving us his valuable time to learn more about Performance Engineering and career prospects in it for students and professionals.