Functional test automation is relatively slow and heavy in execution. Selenium scripts, for example, need to launch a browser, open the website and testdata needs to be present. We can speed up testing by running the test scripts in parallel on distributed machines. This incredibly speeds up the in-browser tests and quick and accurate feedback is given.
In the time that I worked for Spil Games we decided to set up a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for both manual testing and automated testing. It’s essentially a single blade with 2 x 6 Intel Xeon E5-2630 @ 2.3GHz, 1 TB of solid-state drives (SSD’s) and about 130 GB of memory. The performance was an issue in the past, that’s why we have chosen for solid-state drives (the response of the virtual machine is ‘almost’ instant).
Manual testing: We had a pool of pre-configured operating systems and browser versions. The Virtual Desktop Infrastructure will create a virtual machine on demand, every time somebody wants to access a specific machine. It’s made by using VMware View that allows graphics acceleration over the PCoIP (PC-over-IP) protocol which makes it possible to test everything you want to in a browser and it is close to optimal performance.
Automated testing: We had a dedicated pool of virtual machines with DHCP reserved IP-addresses with which we can establish a Selenium Grid. We used virtual machines with Windows 7 and 3 GB of memory and all the required browsers installed. Remote test execution of the Selenium scripts is, with the described setup, even faster than execution on the local machine.
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Alternatives:
- Sauce Labs: Run automated Selenium tests in the cloud or manually test your site on any browser instantly. Videos, screenshots, and developer tools make debugging a snap.
- TestingBot: Cross browser testing with Selenium Online. Automatically test your website on various browsers with Selenium.
- BrowserStack: BrowserStack is a cross-browser testing tool, to test public websites and protected servers, on a cloud infrastructure of desktop and mobile browsers.