Accelerating the test effort with distributed testing

The HCL DevOps Test UI (Test UI) UI Test perspective helps you accelerate the test effort by providing ways to distribute test execution across multiple browsers and multiple computers simultaneously.

Running a Web UI test on multiple browsers simultaneously

When you run a Web UI test, you can run it on multiple browsers simultaneously and thus achieve browser coverage for that test. You do this by selecting the Run on several devices and browsers in parallel check box in the Run Test wizard.

Run configuration - select browser

Running multiple Web UI tests on multiple browsers simultaneously

You can further accelerate the test effort by running multiple Web UI tests on multiple browsers and mobile devices simultaneously. You do this by selecting a group of tests in the Test Navigator, including Web UI tests in a compound test, and selecting Run Distributed Tests .

Run Distributed Tests

For instructions, see Running multiple Web UI and compound tests simultaneously.

Running multiple Web UI tests on multiple browsers and platforms simultaneously

The next scenario in accelerating the test effort is the same as the previous one, but in this case you also distribute the tests across multiple remote computers. To do this, you install a DevOps Test Performance agent on each remote computer and point the agent at the Test UI. Be sure to specify the host name and port or IP address of the Test UI and select the Web UI checkbox. Also, be sure to shell-share DevOps Test Performance and Test UI. For further instructions, see Installing DevOps Test Performance agents, especially Step 12.

During test execution, the agent computer is given priority over local execution; that is, tests always run on the agent computer by default if agents are available to the workbench. If no agents are available, tests run on the local computer.

Each remote agent can include several channels (or streams) for running tests, and if the number of selected tests is greater than the number of channels, each channel can contain multiple Web UI tests. The Web UI tests within a channel are run sequentially.

In the Web UI Playback (Desktop) Preferences (Window > Preferences > Test > Test Execution > UI Test Playback (Desktop) > Desktop), you can set the number of parallel channels for each agent computer.

Accelerated functional testing preferences

You can set the number of parallel channels to the number of virtual users (VUs) that you are licensed for or to any number that is to be associated with this feature. The default value is 5. Limit the number to no more than 15 on a computer with 4 GB of RAM. The selected Web UI tests are pre-arranged into the specified number of channels based on earlier execution times of each test, thus balancing the total execution time of each channel.
Note: If you run compound tests, the number of compound tests multiplied by the number of selected browsers must not exceed the number of channels.

For more information about running multiple Web UI tests and compound tests by using a DevOps Test Performance schedule, see Running tests from a schedule.

You can also automate your testing by running the test from the command line interface, by running the test from Engineering Test Management, or by running the test with HCL DevOps Deploy. For more information, refer to the following topics: