Performance engineering as a discipline goes back several decades. I’ve heard firsthand accounts of testing and optimization of software from the 1960s. Still, much of what we practice today has built up in the last twenty years or so, since the first generation of commercial performance testing tools started appearing.
It can be hard to describe all the different skills that go into performance engineering. Most people in the field agree that it is a intersection of disciplines that includes testing, optimization, and systems engineering. There are great depths to be explored even in these subjects, and they need to be thought about in order to think about how to make more of us.
Read more at Soasta
