Parallelize your tests with Test-Load-Balancer

With the fact that Cruise runs jobs in parallel to make long running test suites go faster, you can simply split your long running test suite into multiple suites and create jobs for each one. Given enough build agents, Cruise can run all jobs within a specified stage simultaneously, which means your long running testing can be done in a snap.

But wait, why do I need to manually split my test suites?

For example, I have a unit-test target in my ant build script which include more than 100 tests. Those tests are organized by corresponding packages, so it's hard to split them in an easy way. It's a burden to most of Cruise users.

That's why we have Test-Load-Balancer now.

What is test-load-balancer?

TLB(Test-Load-Balancer) is a tool that can split test suites for you in Cruise. With TLB, you can simply specify how many pieces you want to split for a specific job using an easy, intuitive way. TLB can automatically work out how many pieces and which piece that current job should do. For example, you have a unit test job running on Linux environment named 'ut-linux', it has 100 tests and costs 10 minutes. Now you want to split it to three jobs, what you need to do is just replace the old 'ut-linux' job with three jobs: 'ut-linux-1', 'ut-linux-2', 'ut-linux-3'. Then you can run unit tests on Linux in three pieces simultaneously, and get benefits of reducing time cost to one third of the old cost.

How to use it?

First, download test-load-balancer jar file and add it to the classpath of ant build script.

Then, change your build.xml as following:

<typedef name="filter-fileset" classname="com.googlecode.tlb.support.junit.FilterFileSet" classpathref="classpath"/>

<junit>
<batchtest todir="target/test-results">
<filter-fileset dir="target/test-classes" includes="**/*Test.class"/>
</batchtest>
<classpath refid="classpath" />
</junit>

Third, change your Cruise configuration to use TLB style jobs such as ut-linux-1, ut-linux-2, ut-linux-3 ...

Then you can get the benefits of faster run.

Further information about test-load-balancer.

A video demonstration about TLB: