

Mozilla Test Swarm Alpha Open - fogus
http://ejohn.org/blog/test-swarm-alpha-open/

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judofyr
I have a Windows 95 here with IE3, but it doesn't look like Test Swarm works
with it :/

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mitchellh
The only problem I see here is that a business developing some web application
won't want to run their code on something as public as TestSwarm where people
donate their own CPUs, because it can potentially give too much away about
their POSSIBLY top-secret product or top-secret upcoming features.

BUT that being said, TestSwarm is open source, so a company could easiy grab
the source code from github (linked below) and set it up on their own private
cluster behind their corp firewall.

<http://github.com/jeresig/testswarm>

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jeresig
That's fine because I don't particularly want commercial projects running on
TestSwarm.com. I'm keeping it exclusive to large, trusted, open source
projects. Honestly, if commercial projects wish to get help from general users
who donate machines they should be willing to pay for the service.

But, as you noted, it's also completely open source and anyone is perfectly
welcome to run their own swarm on their intranet or public site.

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JBiserkov
Love it!

It would be nice to have a desktop "app" that launches all/some of the
installed browsers and automatically opens the required tabs. This way it will
be much easier: I'm going away...better share some CPU first...double-click,
I'm done.

Update: on a second thought, it can even prioritize, e.g. open the browsers
that are "Most Wanted" in the moment.

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jeresig
I'm actually starting to work with some developers on this (likely a Java
app). I absolutely agree that having this tool be made available to those
running the clients would be very useful.

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TimothyFitz
Almost everyone is splitting their tests by browser; are we (IMVU) the only
ones who have to horizontally shard because of test times?

Granted, our list of fully supported platforms is small (effectively IE6, IE7,
IE8, and FF3.5) considering our downloadable client is currently windows-only.

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jeresig
If I'm understanding you correctly, TestSwarm handles this, actually. If you
watch the video walkthrough you can see the tests being split apart and run
against multiple browsers simultaneously. Not only does this allow the results
to complete faster but it also helps to make error correction easier (only re-
running a sub-section of tests to try and get a good response, rather than re-
running the entire suite).

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hugs
Running tests more than once at the same time by default is a very good idea.

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dschobel
Phenomenally cool, it's an instant testing infrastructure without having to
juggle VMs.

I really hope they start a pay-version for commercial projects soon.

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jeresig
I've thought about it, but it just seems too tricky. Businesses want
guarantees of security and privacy that a "wild west" cloud like TestSwarm.com
can't provide.

Instead, I just opted to release all the software as open source. If a
corporation wants to use it for their commercial projects they can set up
their own swarm and worry about those issues.

It definitely seems like there could be a profit strategy here but I can't
quite see it yet (nor am I hugely interested in heading down that path).

~~~
dschobel
I think there's a big potential for a commercial product here. Couldn't all of
the security and privacy issues be addressed by just buying a bunch of
hardware, setting up the VMs and then selling testing time?

Rather than fully distributed make it more (pardon the buzz word) cloud-like?

With the amount of javascript being written these days, I think the instant
testing infrastructure with zero maintenance would be a huge sell for small
and medium size companies.

edit: Although, for that matter if you're going to own the
hardware/configuration, you could just as well go with Selenium and sell time
on that. Either way, I think people would buy time on either sort of a setup.

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jeresig
If you're doing that then you might as well use Selenium Grid:
<http://selenium-grid.seleniumhq.org/>

Granted it doesn't have the nice continuous integration view or the error
correction that Test Swarm has but everything else is there.

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andreyf
There's a bug on my user page, which says I connected a test instance
"Connected 2 hours ago" when it was a couple of minutes.

~~~
jeresig
Yeah, time zone issue: <http://github.com/jeresig/testswarm/issues#issue/1>

