Running Cucumber in Parallel

First of all, if you using Cucumber as a BDD tool and having large feature set, then you are at the right place.  Now we have an awesome Ruby Gem called ‘Parallel_tests’ which is going to make our life much easier by parallelising large set of feature to run much faster. You can read more ‘Parallel_tests’ on GitHub.

In this short tutorial, we will see how to use ‘Parallel_tests’ in our project and how to aggregate generated html cucumber reports.

We will use source code from my GitHub repository ‘Cuke_Experiment‘. Please download source code if you have development environment ready

You need to have Ruby 2.0.0 for this demonstration.

Using Parallel_Tests Gem

Parallel_Tests is a Ruby Gem for running RSpec, Cucumber and Test::Unit on multiple CPUs in the parallel to speed up tests. There are many benefits using Parallel_Tests Gem into your Cucumber.

• It is very easy to use in your existing project or test suite
• Parallel Tests forks cucumber into number of CPUs processes and you can specify number of processes.
• Parallel Tests can generate separate reports for each process using variable ‘ENV[‘TEST_ENV_NUMBER’]’
• You don’t need to change your test options. Just keep everything inside  ‘-o “your test profiles’

Installing Gem

You can just run following command to install parallel_tests gem into your existing project

OR Simply add it in your Gemfile.

And add following line

Now, you need to install bundler.

That’s it. You are now ready to use parallel_tests into your project.

Using Gem

Once you have successfully installed parallel_tests Gem then you are now ready to use it. By default, it forks cucumber into 4 processes depending on number of feature files. If number of feature files are less than 8 then it usually use 2 processes.

Now that, this command will run all your feature files within the ‘features’ directory.

Running features from sub-directories

You can run specific set of features from sub-directories by navigating to that directory.

Running features with specific profiles or tags

You can run parallel_tests y using specific profiles or tags using test options  ‘- o’

 Running features by specifying number of processes

You can specify number of processes to speed up feature executions by using option ‘-n’

This will break down features into 8 different processes.

Generating HTML Reports

We can easily generate HTML reports for the each process and aggregate reports for each process. As we said earlier that there is a variable ENV[‘TEST_ENV_NUMBER’] which gives details about all the process that cucumber scenarios are executing.

In order to generate reports for all the processes, we need to create a profile in our ‘cucumber.yml’. Let’s call this profile ‘default’ profile.

This will create HTML report for each process and name it as report.html, report2.html and so on.

Source Code & Quick Start

Source code available on GitHub ‘Cuke_Experiment‘ , Download it and get started. I assume, you have Ruby development environment ready(RVM, XCode, Homebrew etc etc)

It will execute all the features in 2 different processes and generate report.html and report2.html. My i-Term look like this:

 

Watch Video Demo

You can watch in action in the following Video

 

 

 

HAPPY BDD !!