Creating a Fast Feedback Loop

One of the main problems you hear people talking about with Selenium is how long it takes to run all of their tests. I have heard gures ranging from a couple of hours to a couple of days. In this chapter, we will have a look at how we can speed things up and get the tests that you are writing running both quickly and regularly.

The second problem that you may come across is getting other people to run your tests; this is usually because it is a pain to set up the project to work on their machine and it's too much effort for them. By making things run fast, we are going to make it very easy for others to check out your code and get themselves up and running.

How does this create a fast feedback loop? Well, if your developers are running all of the tests before every check in, they will know if the changes they have made to the code break things before the code leaves their machine.

They can also update the tests as the code changes, transforming the tests into living documentation.