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I am a Software Testing Enthusiast and i have mostly worked on Functional Testing(Manual). I am interested in performance testing and i have worked on a very small project where i used LoadRunner.

I would love to be a part of an open source team which works on Performance Testing. As a lot of experienced guys are part of this community can you please tell where to look and how to master the art of performance testing.

P.S. I think this question might be considered as Off Topic but when i searched the internet for open source performance testing projects i mostly got results related to tools. I dont know how to proceed. Your help will be appreciated.

UPDATE: Thanks everyone for your response. All of your answers have helped a lot.

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  • Have you looked for data processing projects? ETL, data warehouse, message routing (Camel?), XML stream querying projects? What about graphics processing/rendering tools? What about DBMS (relational, in-memory, XML, graph-based, object, etc.)?
    – dzieciou
    Jun 5, 2013 at 17:49
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    I understood you would like to work in a team that develops a software requiring performance testing, rather than used for performance testing (e.g., LoadRunner or JMeter as Joe Strazzere suggested in hist answer). Correct me if I am wrong
    – dzieciou
    Jun 6, 2013 at 4:51
  • @dzieciou : Yes i am looking for projects which require performance testing. Also i would love to work for a project which uses C# or VSTS.
    – Dan
    Jun 6, 2013 at 14:46

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You will need to dramatically broaden your skills base, for the jump from a manual tester to a performance tester is quite large. There are many posts on the Internet which speak to "foundation skills" for a performance tester. Find them (using one of the core skills: research) and take them to heart. For if you have the core skills in place you can be at 95% of capability within about six weeks. If you lack sold core foundation skills you will struggle, have low efficiency and demonstrate low output to your clients for the entire time you are in the profession.

Once you have mastered your core skills, then you can look at tools and a program where you have a mentor for your first six months or so. The tool is really only 10-15% of the skills required for a successful performance tester. Mind you it is a critical 10-15% and unless you have mastered some of the foundation skills you will never be able to master the tool. There are also process and project management skills which come into play which you will acquire during the internship.

Can you get there? Yes. Be prepared to spend a year or longer coming from a manual functional testing background. If you think just learning a tool will get the job done then you will be joining a growing problem in our industry which is delivery of low value services which are damaging the value base and which has resulted in an odd economic condition where the average value of what is being delivered is so low that it has overwhelmed the natural tendency of wages to rise in a low resource condition.

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  • The OP was not asking for a tool like JMeter to learn, but project to participate in, where through participation he could learn performance testing. Read my comment and his answer.
    – dzieciou
    Jun 7, 2013 at 16:04
  • @James Pulley: Thanks for your answer, i did some search and found out what basics do i need to cover. I will start with a programming Language, Networking, SQL and HTTP basics. Good for me I already know C# and SQL. Thanks a lot for emphasizing on advocating for a solid foundation.
    – Dan
    Jun 9, 2013 at 15:26
  • @dzieciou, James Pulley: If you dont mind, can you guys suggest some networking study guide or book. I am clueless about from where to start in Networking. Thanks.
    – Dan
    Jun 10, 2013 at 10:13
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Apache JMeter is open source.

Start here: http://jmeter.apache.org/

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  • Joe, OP is looking project requiring performance testing, not the tool for performance testing. Unless JMeter requires itself that kind of testing ;-)
    – dzieciou
    Jun 6, 2013 at 15:49
  • Ok. I suppose pretty much every open source project requires at least some performance testing. Jun 6, 2013 at 16:57

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