[ANN] rspec-abq for running rspec test suites in parallel

[Dan Manges]

Hey everybody,

We just released a new open source library for running RSpec test suites in parallel, either locally or across multiple CI jobs, and I wanted to share it with the RSpec community.

It’s built using bindings into ABQ, which is a universal test runner. ABQ wraps existing test suites to distribute tests using a message queue.

https://github.com/rwx-research/abq

https://github.com/rwx-research/rspec-abq

We’ve designed it as a drop-in developer experience. For example:

# without abq
bundle exec rspec

# add rspec-abq
bundle add rspec-abq --group test

# use abq to run the rspec test suite in 3 parallel processes
abq test -n 3 -- bundle exec rspec

Because ABQ wraps native test frameworks rather than replacing them, you can continue using the RSpec CLI and any of the options it supports, such as --tag or --example.

Unlike other libraries that split tests for parallel execution, ABQ will aggregate all of the results into a single report to make it easier to review failures across workers, especially when splitting across multiple CI jobs.

For more context see the announcement blog post and the documentation:

https://www.rwx.com/blog/abq-1-3-generally-available-open-source-release

https://www.rwx.com/docs/abq

We have lots of ideas for additional functionality we could add to ABQ, and I’d love to hear from anybody who wants to chat about test parallelization or performance.

Dan