distributed TestNG

[Davide Del Vento]

Hi,
I've seen the messages about the distributed TestNG in this list and
I've understood that it is not supported. What it's not clear is the
why.

Did just Cedric lost interest and left it as an incomplete experiment,
or there were implementation hurdles? My understanding (without
looking at the code yet) is that just a little effort is needed to
complete it, so I'm wondering why (since the initial experiments in
2006) nobody came forward and completed it. I would like to try to
complete this implementation myself, but before I waste my time in
something that has been already tried (and maybe can't be done quickly/
easily enough), I'd like to get feedback from others that did it in
the past (if any).

My interest in this feature is more for a regression kind of testing
on different environments than workload distribution to accelerate
runtime. In fact, another fine way to achieve what I need, is simply
to re-run the tests on the various platform. And that is working fine,
except that I end up with quite a lot of reports, which then became a
pain to read.

So my next question is: is there any way to consolidate reports from
separate runs? I know I could write my own Reporter and use it to save
(maybe serialize) the data instead of creating the HTML. And then I
may write something that reads all that data from different runs (on
different platforms), consolidates it and uses the original testNG
Reporter to create the HTML in that format I love. But again, this
sounds like a need others had (since the original
http://beust.com/weblog2/archives/000362.html post, people were
salivating for runs on different platform) so I'm wondering if there
is a way to do it without changing/adding code to testNG or if there
is much much more work to do than it seems.

Thanks and have a nice weekend,
Davide

[Cédric Beust ♔]

Hi Davide,

I didn't really lose interest (actually, this aspect still interests me greatly) but I did run out of time. I also reached what I had considered the first milestone that I had set for myself: making it possible to distribute TestNG by making all the important objects serializable and writing up a proof of concept where I have n slave windows, one master shell and seeing it round robing all the tests, waiting and gathering the results.

A few efforts happened after that from various contributors, such as running TestNG on GridGain, but none of them gained traction or the developer got bored or moved on to other things.

I think the need for a distributed testing framework is there but it might not have reached critical mass. My gut feeling is that you can already gain significant speed gains by multithreading alone, but I do know of a few big companies that built their own distributed testing framework because they are running a huge number of tests every day.

I'd love it if you could pick up the distributed effort and see how far you can take it and I'll be happy to help.

As for consolidating reports, you've covered the main ways of achieving this. I've seen users use XSL to consolidate the XML files, which might be a good idea too (using something else than TestNG to do this, not sure if XSL is the best tool to achieve this, though).

-- 

Cédric

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[Davide Del Vento]

Hi Cedric,
this sounds great, I'll look into it and let you know.
Thanks,
Davide

2011/11/19 Cédric Beust ♔ <ced...@beust.com>:

[Mallikarjuna Rao]

Hi Davide/ Cedric,

Its really a great step to distribute TestNgs across different VMs or Nodes. I am very much excited to participate in implementation if not done already.

Davide can you please reply anything was started/ got bored after some implementation. If so i will continue further to make this achievable.

Regards
Malli