Remote Test Execution Demonstration

Greetings, fellow testers. Last month, Jared wrote excellent article on the new remote execution engine. Remote test execution is an extremely powerful tool for your development and testing team, especially when using multiple servers and when scheduled on a nightly basis.

There are a few components involved:

• A storage service, which is connected to a SQL Server database.
• A scheduling service, which maintains a list of all the execution servers and a connection to the storage service. You can think of this as the manager of remote execution.
• One or more remote execution servers, and of course
• The Test Studio client from which you’ll be starting everything.

The latest release of Test Studio streamlines these and makes the setup and configuration much easier to use; I’ve recorded a demonstration video, an end-to-end walk-through.

video: Remote Test Execution Setup

There are a few key items to note. First of all, as described in the post I referenced above, each of the components can be on a different system. In this demo I put the Storage service, Scheduling service, and one of the Execution servers all on one system; there’s no requirement that you do that. In the demo, I used three virtual machines local to my own computer; of course these could instead be on systems in your server closet, on your colo-hosted servers, or any cloud-based servers that can reach your systems under test.

Secondly, the Storage service uses a SQL Server database. If you already have SQL server running, you can use that. The account will need to have the DBCreator Server-Level Role in SQL, as Test Studio will be creating its own database. You will not need to create a database ahead of time. Also note that the storage server database won’t need any special settings, such as pagination. You don’t need a pre-existing database server though; Test Studio can install SQL Server 2008 Express and take care of all the needed setup.

I encourage you to grab a couple of servers or virtual machines and see how your feedback cycle can be shortened by running a full set of tests on a regular basis.  

Peace,
Steven

About the Author

Steven Vore

Steven Vore is an Evangelist for Telerik's Test Studio. He has worked in software support and testing for the better part of two decades, and enjoys exploring ways to make software easier to use. He is a fan of movies and music, and can often be found on Twitter as @StevenJV.