Monday, November 26, 2012

Automation feedback - when to think about parallelization

I've designed a few automated testing systems now. A frequent anti-patten I've seen is using UI automation tools such as selenium to drive acceptance tests. One of the big pains is that as a project grows this system becomes more and more cumbersome, requires a lot of maitenance (to the point the cost of keeping them is questionable) and slows down feedback. The main goals to aim for are:

  1.  Feasible to implement in terms of development skills
  2.  Low cost in terms of time and maitenenace effort
  3.  Effective and timely feedback


There are a couple of options I've come across

  • Run a nightly build of UI tests (feedback once every 24 hours.)
    • I tried this on a project for Google. It can work with small teams with limited checkins (~10 per day) where functionality is well defined and it is easy to blame revision numbers
  • Parallelization - Ideally, each test runs concurrently on its own environment. 
    • Problems I've faced:
      • Can be dependant on Hardware if VMs aren't an option
      • Usually BS trying to get corporate IT departments to give you what you need
      • May miss bugs that would occur naturally when 2 users are concurrently using system that would be caught by running them on the same environment
  • Continuous run
    • The test suite just constantly builds and run tests
      • Requires an extremely robust test suite or very basic site
      • Can make debugging difficult because tracking the run against the build is very rapid
  • Test prioritization
    • Label tests as core and have them run very frequently (every checkin)
    • Run tests labelled regression in a seperate pipeline
      • This is usually very feasible
What do I recommend? Don't run acceptance tests at all through the UI. Use a proper domain model so it runs as a headless check and have general smoke tests. However, js heavy websites where business logic is happening a in the user interface means this isnt always feasible. I'd probably choose parallelization since it strikes well in terms of feasibility, cost and feedback.

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