Improving our Cypress test automation time by 3x

At Hasura, Cypress test automation was used to test their GraphQL-engine's UI. However, running all tests synchronously took more than 30 minutes, slowing down the development process. To improve this, parallel testing was introduced by spawning multiple processes in a single container. Despite facing issues with Xvfb and inconsistent results, Cypress v3.1.0 allowed for parallelism on CI systems using the --parallel flag. By enabling parallel tests and recording them through Cypress Dashboard service, Hasura reduced their overall build times from ~45 minutes to ~15 minutes.