In this episode Anshul Sharma, a lead automation engineer, discusses how Emmi Solutions made the move from testing on an in-house Selenium Grid to the Cloud. She also shares her top tips on how to expand test coverage while moving toward a full, continuous integration workflow.

About Anshul Sharma

Anshul has over 10 years of experience working in software industry, during her tenure she wore multiple hats working as a software developer, technical designer, business analyst before finally moving to automation. She is passionate about technology, using code to test code, and blurring the lines between Dev and QA. She worked with major financial clients like Deutsche Bank, RBC Dexia Investor Services and moved herself to healthcare company worked for Walgreens for long time before settling down to Emmi Solutions, a leader in healthcare technology which builds software to empower patient taking better care of their health, she felt personally connected by contributing to the health industry with modern technologies.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• One of the ways people say is like let’s distribute your test case in two different machines which is like Selenium grid but like the company where I work with a small company and we do have a lot of responsibilities which are shared by different people. So one of the biggest challenge was maintaining the grid. I’m like a person who wants to work faster and get faster. So I want to focus more on automation and less on the infrastructure. So that’s one of the reason we decided to move from our hosted infrastructure on Selenium grid to the cloud platform.
  
• One of the major challenges we faced was that we only had a single point of failure. So we only had one master node which was taking all the requests passing it basically to multiple nodes. And as soon as that failed our grid went down and we could not run our tests.
• I think the major difference why we choose SuaceLabs over BrowerStack was that for me would say is Sauce gave fast support and it was easy to understand, because I was as I said I was pretty new to the cloud. I didn’t even know, like what other configuration I had to change in my framework, so that I can just spin up new instances to make it work. So I got a lot of help from them initially. Like when I asked questions they were pretty quick in responding.
  
• You know I tell this thing to people like Hey I moved my stuff from the in-house threat to the cloud. And people say is it slower. How does it performance in the cloud compared to on a of grid? Well definitely there is a difference in the performance of test. But if you’re running the test and parallel then I don’t see any significant slowness or any performance issues. In fact sometimes I find it even faster because of the way the grid was set up or maybe we had a limited amount of nodes to run those test it was taking some time. And also you had to do a lot of configuration on your Jenkins to use different builder threads to build on what machine. But with the cloud platform you basically what you pay you get.
• So here are some of the best practices I would like to share. The first one is make sure your tests are atomic that they are independent of themselves. It doesn’t have any dependency because lots of many times I have seen people have dependency injections for each task that a test is complete. Then run test and it sometimes goes into cyclic dependency. So make sure your tests which are atomic simple and faster. One other major thing what I’m doing. with my automation is none of my tests are taking more than 2 minutes to run. So it has to be pretty quick.Make sure you break your test into smaller units and run them in parallel. That’ll save you a lot of time and it will give you quicker results…
  

Resources

• Checkout Anshul’s webinar on moving your selenium tests on cloud
• Also join Anshul at #bscwest2017 to hear her story of how to move your selenium testing to cloud, the discoveries, thoughts and challenges faced and the best practices to do faster automation.

Connect with Anshul Sharma

• Twitter: @asharmaselenium
• LinkedIn: anshulsharmaselenium

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