How to speed up Test Execution using Selenium Grid

As we know that Selenium is the most popular web application automation tool in the market, because it is available at free of cost and open source. When testing a web application, will get couple of things in our mind.

1. How to run the test case in different browser’s?
2. How to run the test case in different versions of same browser?
3. How to run the test case in different operating systems?
4. How to run the test case parallel in different browsers or different versions of same browser or different operating systems?

Selenium Grid is the solution for all the above problems. Selenium Grid is one of the component of Selenium Tool. By using Grid, we can manage multiple environments from a central point and making it easy to run the tests against a vast combination of browsers/OS, which reduces the amount of total time to run your full automation tests.

Selenium Grid uses a Hub-Node concept, where test cases will be running on a single machine called Hub, but the execution will be done by different machines called Nodes. i.e., Node will have the browser drivers and Hub will be passing your test cases to each node and that will be executing.

What is Hub?

Hub is central point to the Selenium GRID, which receives the all the requests and distribute them to the right nodes. There is only on Hub in entire Selenium GRID Architecture.

What is Node?

Nodes are the selenium instances that will execute the tests. There can be any number of nodes in GRID. Each and every node communicates with hub and performs the appropriate action.

                        

How to set-up Selenium Grid?

Step – 1: Download the selenium standalone jar file from http://www.seleniumhq.org/download/

Step – 2: Run the selenium standalone jar file from command prompt as shown below:

C:\GridDemo\java –jar selenium-server-standalone.jar –role hub –port <port_number>

We can check the status of the node by accessing the URL http://localhost:<port_number>/grid/console

Step - 3: Now, go to the other machine and run the following command to setup the nodes

C:\java –jar selenium-server-standalone.jar –role node –hub http://<Hub_IP_Address>:<Hub_port_number>/grid/register -port <node_port_number>

Now, go the Selenium GRID web interface to see the configured nodes. All are set to use the Selenium GRID, only we have to do is develop the scripts that can run on GRID.

For more information, refer link https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/wiki/Grid2