Cultivating Performance Awareness in a Testing Project: A Focus on Machine-Readable Travel Documents

This paper presents a course project to integrate performance engineering concepts into a software testing and quality assurance curriculum. It uses the real-world context of validating and testing Machine-Readable Travel Documents (MRTDs) to integrate multiple testing techniques, including unit testing, mocking, mutation testing, and performance measurement. This integration allows students to ''connect the dots'' between different testing methodologies, enhancing their ability to apply them holistically in software testing projects. A key goal of the project is to help students understand how performance testing naturally fits into the overall testing process—just as it would in real-world practice—alongside functional testing. Students engage in hands-on exercises that require evaluating both functional correctness (e.g., conformance to MRTD standards) and performance attributes, such as execution time and the cost of encoding and decoding large sets of input records. The preliminary results suggest that this approach not only deepens students' understanding of performance engineering but also encourages them to view testing as a multifaceted process. We share this project with other educators as a framework for incorporating performance testing into software testing curricula, ensuring that students can practice critical testing skills in a real-world context.