How do I enter the performance testing space when I don't get much commercial experience in work?

Question

Not sure if this is the correct area to ask this, but I've recently got to do a little performance testing in work using the likes of JMETER.

I primarily focus on automation/security/manual but I've really got an urge to get into performance, how do I get to where I need to be to be employed in that space? I have grasped it quite well to date, doing a few sprints and cutting down performance across our web application noticeably, but a lot of it is still relatively confusing to me.

What is a proactive plan for achieving this goal? I'm thinking some books is a good place to start but it seems to be an area relatively lacking in books/documentation.

Answer 1

The only way to become an expert in performance testing is doing performance testing (something like the 10-000 hours rule)

Remember one main thing: performance testing is not limited to mastering one or several tools as creating and running a load test only a tip of the iceberg, in fact the stage where you have load test results is where performance testers work actually begins as you need to interpret these results and figure out saturation point, bottleneck, root cause and what needs to be done to resolve it.

Assuming all above you need to have comprehensive experience in many fields, i.e. different operating systems, application and web servers, databases, APM and Profiling tools, networking, and so on. See The Ultimate Competence Matrix for Performance Testers for above (and more) required skills listed and explained.