As to improve the Selenium 2 test speed?

Question

I'm trying to create Selenium tests to my Java application, but each test spends about 5 seconds to execute. The most time consuming part of the test is to initialize the Selenium.

I'm initialize the web driver @before each test and kill the driver @after test.

Is there any way to start the webdriver and "restart it" every test? Or should I start it and run all tests and then finishes him off? How do I can reduce the time of tests?

I'm using selenium 2, maven and Junit 4.

So I am starting and finishing the tests

@Before
public  void setUpBeforeClass() throws Exception {
    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver",
    "drivers/chromedriver.exe");
    driver = new ChromeDriver();
    driver.get(baseUrl);
}

@After
public  void tearDownAfterClass() throws Exception {
    driver.quit();
}

Thanks advance.

Answer 1

Some people may prefer to use a new Driver instance for every test in order to avoid one test's side-effects from impacting another test. I have never run into that problem. For efficiency reasons, I try to re-use a single Driver for all tests in a suite.

Answer 2

Agree with User246 and here is an example of how to do:

protected WebDriver getWebDriver() {

  if (driver == null) {
   driver = new InternetExplorerDriver();
  }
  return driver;
}