What is Parallel Testing? Understanding the Benefits and Best Practices
Businesses are relying more on digital technology, leading to a higher demand for software.
To increase efficiency, companies prioritize software utilization. As a result, software complexity has increased, leaving little room for errors.
It is crucial to use testing technologies to validate software and ensure it meets business demands. Testing improves the world of DevOps, but it can be costly without choosing the proper testing framework.
To maximize the effectiveness of your business' software development, it is crucial to acknowledge the importance of parallel testing. Neglecting this vital aspect can result in many missed opportunities. Therefore, it is recommended that your team prioritize parallel testing to ensure that you can test and release frequently, your software is optimized for your target audience and stays competitive in the market. In light of customers' expectations for comprehensive feature sets within a single software product, businesses must expand their applications accordingly. However, time constraints, testing challenges and high quality stakes can make this task daunting. Fortunately, parallel testing provides a solution to this challenge.
The purpose of this article is to provide a balanced and impartial perspective on the significance of parallel testing, along with its practical applications and potential to transform testing methodologies. Our focus will be on the notion of parallel testing and its definition.
What is Parallel Testing?
In the past, some software products were released despite known issues because of limited testing time. As agile software development has become more popular, the process has become more flexible and efficient. Automated testing methods have also been created, leading to quicker software releases and increased success rates, all while maintaining high quality. Parallel testing plays a key role in this.
The technique of parallel testing is a way to leverage the capabilities of automation testing by enabling the simultaneous execution of the same tests across a variety of contexts, real-world device configurations, and browser settings. Parallel testing is also known as "testing in parallel".
Parallel testing is an effective method that can save a lot of time and resources. Unlike distributed testing, which uses individual test components that operate in a distributed way, parallel testing enables multiple tests to run simultaneously.
This method is highly beneficial for optimizing testing efficiency and improving the overall productivity of the testing team. It can be very useful when automated web app browser testing is needed. For instance, when validating an application on different operating systems and browser version combinations.
Benefits of Parallel Testing
Parallel testing brings numerous benefits to software development, including heightened coverage and the potential to detect bugs faster. Parallel testing is a highly effective and cost-efficient methodology for increasing test coverage and return on test team investment. This approach involves conducting simultaneous tests across multiple platforms, devices, and browsers.
This empowers organizations to ensure the reliability and robustness of their software while simultaneously delivering an exceptional user experience that meets the highest standards of quality and performance.
Speed
When evaluating an application, the traditional sequential testing method can be time-consuming. However, parallel testing offers the opportunity to distribute the testing process across various configurations, resulting in a significant reduction in overall testing time. By utilizing a single script, you can simultaneously test your application on multiple devices, leading to a significant decrease in testing time.
Cost-Efficiency
The cost of constructing, maintaining, and continually modernizing your own testing environment can put a significant dent in your finances. When it comes to parallel testing, maintenance is no longer a burden. In fact, you lease the necessary testing environment, which is always kept up to date. In addition, cloud-based testing grids permit you to execute tests in parallel, which brings down the cost of each test iteration.
Enhancement of Current Testing Process
The quality assurance process at your organization can benefit from parallel testing.
If you test at a high speed, you will be able to test more.
This presents an opportunity for your quality assurance team to enhance their testing process and record bugs more rapidly.
Being up-to-date
With cloud technology, you can be sure that you always have access to the latest versions of the programs and software you use.
Tips for performing Parallel Testing
To conduct multiple tests on a specific infrastructure in a given location, businesses often need a variety of hardware, software, and mobile devices, which can be costly. However, using a public cloud infrastructure can significantly reduce these expenses. Costs are determined by usage, and virtual machines can be used by the quality assurance team to run scripts on multiple settings simultaneously. After testing is finished, the setups can be deactivated, and ongoing costs will not be incurred.
Maintaining test independence is an essential aspect of running tests simultaneously. To achieve this, the quality assurance team can leverage autonomous test scripts, which minimize the number of tests that get blocked during a test run. This approach ensures smoother and more efficient testing processes, enhancing overall productivity and quality.
Also Read: Flipping the Script: A Guide to Negative Testing
Parallel Testing Tools
A significant number of test automation tools available, both open-source and commercial, make parallel testing much more straightforward.
Some popular parallel testing tools include:
Selenium Grid: A tool that allows testers to run Selenium tests in parallel across multiple machines and browsers.
TestNG: This testing framework supports parallel execution of tests across multiple threads and allows testers to group tests based on priority and dependencies.
JUnit: A popular testing framework for Java applications that supports parallel execution of tests using annotations.
Appium: This tool is used for testing mobile applications and supports parallel execution of tests across multiple devices and platforms.
Jenkins: This is a popular open-source automation server that allows testers to create and run parallel test suites across multiple machines and environments.
Apache JMeter: This tool is used for performance testing and can simulate heavy loads on applications by running multiple tests in parallel.
Gatling: Yet another performance testing tool that allows testers to simulate heavy loads and run tests in parallel across multiple machines.
Pytest-xdist: This is a plugin for the pytest testing framework that allows testers to run tests in parallel across multiple CPUs and machines.
Cypress: This tool is used for testing web applications and supports parallel execution of tests across multiple browsers.
Test Evolve: This tool allows testers to run tests in parallel across multiple machines and platforms, while providing detailed reports on test results. Test Evolve supports various testing types, including functional, regression, and performance testing. It can be used for web, mobile, and desktop applications.
When selecting the appropriate tool, relying on reputable developers that have created a reliable product, such as Test Evolve, is essential.
Within the software testing industry, there has been a notable shift towards the implementation of automated testing methodologies as opposed to manual testing. This transition has facilitated the development of more flexible and scalable testing options. However, a persistent challenge associated with automated testing is the ability to execute multiple tests simultaneously.
Organizations often use sequential testing to ensure software quality, but it can be difficult and time-consuming. Luckily, there is now a faster and more efficient option: parallel testing. This method not only maintains high standards, but can also save time and costs.
