on February 4, 2021
Automated tests are part of many programming projects, ensuring the software is flawless. The bigger the project, the larger the test suite can be.This can result in automated tests taking a lot of time to run. In this article you will learn how to run automated tests faster with parallel Continuous Integration machines (CI) and what problems can be encountered. The article covers common parallel testing problems, based on Ruby & JavaScript tests.
Slow automated tests
Automated tests can be considered slow when programmers stop running the whole test suite on their local machine because it is too time consuming. Most of the time you use CI servers such as Jenkins, CircleCI, Github Actions to run your tests on an external machine instead of your own. When you have a test suite that runs for an hour then it’s not efficient to run it on your computer. Browser end-to-end tests for your web project can take a really long time to execute. Running tests on a CI server for an hour is also not efficient. You as a developer need a fast feedback loop to know if your software works fine. Automated tests should help you with that.