Handling parallel UI testing

[Alex Philippi]

Hi all,
we are testing our UI with Remote WebDriver against a selenium hub (Junit). We test focus behaviour also, therefore we only use one node per OS user and this node is able to run only one instance of firefox/chrome/...

Our node setup:
1x Win8 Image -> 1 User with 1 Node (FF,Chrome,IE11)
1x Win7 Image -> 1 User with 1 Node (FF,Chrome,IE11)
1x Mac Mini -> 4 Users, each User with 1 Node @ different Port (FF,Chrome, Safari)

We run our UI tests in parallel (class parallel with JUnit) and from time to time we face the issue, that (on Mac) the WebDriver locks the testport and some UI tests fail.
To connect the node we have to login each user and start the node as process to be able to take screenshots. Otherwise the shots are only black or the tests will be executed in the wrong client resolution.

I wonder how you test your UI.

- Do you run your tests in parallel too?
- Do you got also issues with multiple nodes on one machine?
- Are you able to start multiple instances of a browser inside one user session without any focus issues? Or Is it possible to connect multiple screens to one Mac node to get rid of the other 3 users?
- Do you have to login your user and (automatically) start the node process after a reboot again, to ensure that your screenshots got the desired resolution?

I know, these are a lot of questions, but I hope you can tell me a bit about your testing setup or give me some hints how I can tweak ours:)

Alex