Running tests in parallel using Jenkins Grid plugin

Question

I have Jenkins 1.499 running Watir-Webdriver tests on a Windows 2008 (64bit) server alongside the Grid 2 standalone server (and Jenkins Selenium Grid plugin).

I can run my tests through the standalone server (or plugin) via Jenkins, but they don't run in parallel. What do I need to do to get them running in parallel?

I've tried out the parallel_tests gem, but fork() doesn't seem to be implemented very well for a Windows environment. I think I might need to use TestNG to manage the parallelism, but I'm not really sure and could use some advice if anyone out there knows?

Answer 1

If you are using Ruby, I believe you should be able to use green threads to avoid fork()

http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/html/tut_threads.html

While technically not true parallelism, it should work fine if you are just firing off Watir-Webdriver tests. The idea is to start each thread up separately and have each thread run a test script.

Answer 2

In TestNG.xml file there is an attribute "parallel" that could be used to configure running several test methods/classes at the same time in parallel

<suite name="mySuite" parallel="methods" thread-count="5">
<suite name="mySuite" parallel="tests" thread-count="5">
<suite name="mysuite" parallel="classes" thread-count="5">
<suite name="mySuite" parallel="instances" thread-count="5">

The article http://technologyandleadership.com/testng-running-tests-in-parallel/ gives an indepth description of all these values.