Speed up your tests with parallelization

On BrowserStack, you can run multiple tests at the same time across various device, and OS combinations. This is called parallel testing. Parallel testing gives you the same benefits as running a multi-threaded application.

As software teams move towards the continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) model, the pace of software delivery becomes crucial. With faster builds, you can:

• Release faster and more frequently: Your customers don’t have to wait for that latest feature or bug fix.
• Improve automation coverage without worrying about the wait time: You can automate more test cases without worrying about increasing your build time. It will help you improve automation coverage and reduce manual testing.
• Reduce developer frustration with faster feedback loops: Waiting for a test run to complete can be frustrating at times. With faster builds, your developers can focus on writing code instead of waiting for builds to complete.

The biggest challenge for parallelizing tests is how to write the tests so that they are able to run at the same time without impacting each other and producing flaky results.

1. Create independent tests: To run in parallel, your tests should be independent of each other. When the test cases are dependent, you have to run them in a particular order, and you won’t be able to achieve parallel execution. Your tests need to be self-contained. So, when you run any test, you don’t have to worry about the order in which you run your test suite, and they should be able to run in any order

2. Manage test data: Ensure each test uses its own test data and doesn’t depend on data created from a previous test. Any test data which your test cases need should be independent. Either the data used by individual tests should be isolated or the data should be restored in same state as it was prior to any test run. Also, ensure test run updates don’t overwrite each other.

3. Use Your Framework’s Built-In Functionality: If your framework supports parallel tests, you can tell the test framework how many parallel processes you want. The test runner will spawn a new thread for the number you specify. Test frameworks that support parallelization like this make it fairly easy to add parallel testing into your process.

4. Start with fewer tests that are easy to isolate: Start with the tests that can be most easily converted to parallel, then adapting some or all of the remaining tests after your team has had time to adjust to the parallel testing environment. Once you have started to use parallel testing and have integrated it into your development process, it is easy to expand the quantity and scope of parallel tests as the need arises.

Your App Automate plan supports running the number of parallel tests that you have purchased (5 during free trial). But with test queueing, you can send more parallel test requests to BrowserStack than your plan limit.

The following are the salient points for queueing your tests:

• You can launch an additional number of parallel tests with different device configurations above your parallel limit that you have purchased.
• The additional tests will be queued and they would run as and when your existing running tests complete their execution.
• For instance, if you want to run 5 additional tests, apart from your subscribed limit of, say, 2 parallel tests, we will queue the additional 5 tests until one of the 2 initial tests finish, and a slot is available for execution.
• With queuing, you don’t need to worry about managing your test pipeline - we automatically take care of scheduling and execution for you.
• With this feature, BrowserStack accounts with 1-5 parallels, can queue 5 tests. And, accounts with more than 5 parallels will have a max queue length equal to the number of parallels purchased.
• For example, if you have 2 parallel tests for your account, you can queue up to 5 more tests, but if you have 200 parallel tests, you can queue up to 200 more tests.