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. 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 preconfigured 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.
Image above created with http://www.gliffy.com/
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.
