How to Scale Selenium-based, CPU-intensive QA Sanity Test Suites
The need for thorough and precise quality assurance in software development cannot be overstated. It ensures the robustness, reliability, and user-friendliness of the application. Selenium-based QA Sanity Test Suites are well-known for their efficiency in automating browsers for testing web applications. However, they are also CPU-intensive and, when run locally, they may fail, consume substantial resources, and take up a lot of time. Not only that, local executions lack centralized housekeeping and uniformity in compute resources. Moreover, they present challenges in scalability.
In response to these limitations, a viable solution is to transition to AWS CodePipeline.
Developing high-quality software requires precise, reliable, and efficient quality assurance processes. Selenium-based QA Sanity Test Suites are known for their robust capability to automate browser-based tests. However, they can be CPU-intensive, and running them locally can lead to failures, considerable resource consumption, and lengthy execution times.
Local execution also suffers from a lack of centralized management and uniform computing environments, hindering scalability. As a solution, we propose transitioning to AWS CodePipeline for scalability, reproducibility, and centralized management.
Process Overview
1. Standardize Your Tests: Structure your tests as Maven-based Java programs, ensuring they can be run consistently using the mvn build command.
2. Utilize Git for Centralized Management: Commit your tests to a Git repository. This strategy not only enables version control but also supports centralized management of all your tests, making them readily accessible and trackable.
3. Establish a Uniform Runtime Environment: Create a base Maven Docker image to be used as the consistent runtime environment for all your tests. Push this image to the AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR) for easy accessibility and deployment during test runs.
4. Automate Test and Pipeline Management: Develop two wrapper scripts viz. codebuild.py and codepipeline.py to handle the dynamic creation of AWS CodeBuild projects and manage AWS CodePipelines.
The codebuild.py script facilitates the creation and maintenance of CodeBuild projects for each test, making it easy to add or remove tests as required.
The codepipeline.py script manages the AWS CodePipelines, which combine all the CodeBuild tests to run them for a specific environment. With the potential for multiple environments, this script ensures that each environment’s CodePipeline and CodeBuild are maintained separately and efficiently.
5. Execute Test Suites on Demand: When it’s time to run a test suite for a specific environment, invoke the Python wrapper scripts with the specific Git branch containing the relevant tests. The scripts will update the CodePipeline and CodeBuild projects accordingly and execute the CodePipeline using the appropriate branch.
By employing AWS CodePipeline, you’ll be leveraging a scalable, uniform, and centrally managed testing infrastructure. This not only optimizes resource utilization but also significantly enhances the agility and efficiency of your QA process, contributing to the overall quality and reliability of your software.
Benefits
- Compute Uniformity: CodePipeline ensures that your test suites run in the same environment every time, eliminating any discrepancies in the test results due to varying local environments.
- Reproducibility: Since the compute environment is uniform, the tests are consistently reproducible. This makes it easier to diagnose and fix any issues that may arise during testing.
- Centralized Management: AWS CodePipeline provides a central hub where you can manage all your test suites, making it easier to maintain and update them.
- Scalability: AWS CodePipeline is designed to scale. This means you can accommodate growth in your test suites or increased testing frequency without straining resources.
- Resource Conservation: Since AWS CodePipeline takes care of running your test suites, you free up your local resources for other tasks.
Conclusion
By adopting a more scalable approach to running your Selenium-based QA Sanity Test Suites, you can save time, increase efficiency, and ultimately deliver a higher-quality product. Remember that the value of your testing process is not only in identifying issues but also in enabling smooth and rapid product development. AWS CodePipeline provides the infrastructure to make that possible.