At my work we are running a group of tests that consist of about 3,000 separate test cases. Previously we were running this entire test suite on one machine, which took about 24-72 hours to complete the entire test run. We now have created our own system for grouping and distributing the tests among about three separate machines and the tests are prioritized so that the core tests get run first for more immediate results and the extra tests run when there is an available machine.
I am curious if anyone has found a good way to distribute their tests among several machines to reduce total test time for a complete run and what tools were used to achieve that. I’ve done some research and it looks like TestNG is moving in this direction, but it looks like it is still under quite a bit of development.
We don’t plan on rewriting any of our tests, but as we add new tests and test new products or add-ons I’d like to be able to deal with the fact that we are working with very large numbers of tests. On the other hand, if we can find a tool that would help distribute our Junit 3.x tests even in a very basic fashion, that would be helpful since we wouldn’t have to maintain our own tooling to do that.
I’ve seen some people having a play with distributed JUnit. I can’t particularly vouch for how effective it is, but the other teams I’ve seen seemed to think it was straight forward enough. Hope that helps.