In our environment we have quite a few long-running functional tests which currently tie up build agents and force other builds to queue. Since these agents are only waiting on test results they could theoretically just be handing off the tests to other machines (test agents) and then run queued builds until the test results are available.
For CI builds (including unit tests) this should remain inline as we want instant feedback on failures, but it would be great to get a better balance between the time taken to run functional tests, the lead time of their results, and the throughput of our collective builds.
As far as I can tell, TeamCity does not natively support this scenario so I’m thinking there are a few options:
- Spin up more agents and assign them to a ‘Test’ pool. Trigger functional build configs to run on these agents (triggered by successful Ci builds). While this seems the cleanest it doesn’t scale very well as we then have a lead time of purchasing licenses and will often have need to run tests in alternate environments which would temporarily double (or more) the required number of test agents.
- Add builds or build steps to launch tests on external machines, then immediately mark the build as successful so queued builds can be processed then, when the tests are complete, we mark the build as succeeded/failed. This is reliant on being able to update the results of a previous build (REST API perhaps?). It also feels ugly to mark something as successful then update it as failed later but we could always be selective in what we monitor so we only see the final result.
- Just keep spinning up agents until we no longer have builds queueing. The problem with this is that it’s a moving target. If we knew where the plateau was (or whether it existed) this would be the way to go, but our usage pattern means this isn’t viable.
Has anyone had success with a similar scenario, or knows pros/cons of any of the above I haven’t thought of?
For anyone curious we ended up buying more agents and assigning them to a test pool. Investigations proved that it isn’t possible to update build results (I can definitely understand why this ugliness wouldn’t be supported out of the box).