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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
