Making tests faster

Coherence is pretty fast at starting up and shutting down when you compare it to other software like a database or middleware, such as an application server - however, whilst it is fast and littlegrid helps start up an entire small cluster quickly, it gets a bit tedious if you want to practice Test Driven Development (TDD) or have lots of automated integration tests that you run locally or on your Continuous Integration (CI) server.

What?

Ways of making your tests start faster, how to avoid the repeated start-up and shutdown cluster time when running lots of test classes or a suite of tests and how to run tests in parallel.

Why?

Faster test start-up and faster execution of all your tests makes practicing TDD and CI easier and nicer - besides, no-one likes waiting if there is a faster way!

How?

littlegrid has a number of ways of making things faster, these are:

• A way of establishing your cluster faster, shaving a few seconds off the initial cluster start-up - this is called the fast-start join timeout Fast-start join timeout.
• A way of reusing an established cluster across many test classes or a suite of tests Reusable cluster member group.
• A way of running tests in parallel Parallel tests.