December 2011 Summaries

New command timeout landing next weekWe’ve been working to implement a new timeout that will prevent Selenium failures from consuming many of our customers' minutes. This new timeout will detect issues in Selenium’s end (e.g. browser or Selenium crashing before answering back) and will stop and fail the job when that happens.(Notice: this timeout is only triggered when Selenium doesn't send a reply back to your end after a command has been requested for a certain amount of time. Without this feature, we’ll wait for 30 minutes, or until the full job exceeds the maximum duration, before stopping the whole job).While this feature has not yet been made publicly available, you can start using it now by setting the command-timeout capability to any value you believe reasonable.Starting next week, and as our docs state, we'll be setting this to a default value of 300 seconds for all jobs that don't explicitly specify a timeout limit . Once this happens, you may find that some of your tests get caught and fail. We believe the default value - five minutes - is long enough so that in those special cases, you’ll be able to revisit the cause of such a long command and either fix the problem or extend the timeout.Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns about this.Santiago Suarez OrdoñezPublished:Dec 15, 2011TopicsProduct UpdatesSelenium` A new command timeout feature is being implemented to prevent Selenium failures from consuming customers' minutes. The new timeout will detect issues in Selenium's end and stop the job when it happens. This feature has not been made publicly available yet but can be tested by setting a custom timeout value. Starting next week, the default timeout will be set to 5 minutes for jobs that don't specify a custom limit. This change may cause some tests to fail temporarily, but it's intended to help identify and fix issues.

PHPUnit, the popular PHP testing framework, has traditionally run tests one-at-a-time due to their fast nature. However, with the increasing use of Selenium tests for end-to-end system testing, which are slower and more resource-intensive, running tests sequentially becomes a bottleneck in delivering new code quickly. To address this issue, PHPUnit's parallelism solution was developed, allowing users to run tests in parallel using a command line parameter or a custom TestCase class attribute. The solution is fully cross-platform and has been contributed to PHPUnit core as of November 2011, with a preview version available for testing. However, due to changes in the project's direction, the internal parallelism code will be rewritten by Sebastian, the founder and maintainer, which may delay its release until April 2013.