Running same Cucumber Features on different machines concurrently using parallel_tests gem - ruby

Question

Running same Cucumber Features on different machines concurrently using parallel_tests gem
I'm trying to figure out how to use the parallel_tests gem to run the EXACT SAME Cucumber Features on a variety of different machines concurrently.
Currently I have them running on different machines but the SAME features do not execute, it just splits up the features and runs different features on different machines.
More clarification on what I want to do:
MACHINE 1 (Win 7) - EXECUTE SAME FEATURES CONCURRENTLY
MACHINE 2 (Win 8) - EXECUTE SAME FEATURES CONCURRENTLY
MACHINE 3 (Mac OS X) - EXECUTE SAME FEATURES CONCURRENTLY
...
Also my architecture is:
Cucumber -> Capybara -> Selenium Webdriver -> Selenium Grid
parallel_tests gem: https://github.com/grosser/parallel_tests

Answer 1

The parallel_tests gem is really purposed to parallellism, not executing multiple platforms.
You may find the following useful:
Sauce Gem 30 rake tasks
"The Sauce integration is currently targeted at RSpec and Cucumber, running on a local server you can spin up multiple copies of. It runs a copy of each test for each platform, and divides them up across all the concurrency available to your Sauce Labs account by default"
Hope it helps, I haven't used it myself yet.

Answer 2

Thanks for the clarification. To accomplish testing your app for all the supported environments (OSs/browsers) you can use something as Selenium Grid here is an example Selenium RC: Run tests in multiple browsers automatically.
TestingBot is a service that use this: http://blog.testingbot.com/2012/02/19/selenium-cucumber-capybara
Other approach is described here: http://altoros.github.io/2013/running-capybara-tests-in-remote-browsers/
http://paauspaani.blogspot.mx/2013/05/running-tests-remotely-using-selenium.html
There is also a presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/martinkleppmann/crossbrowser-testing-in-the-real-world
Also this could help you Has anyone figured out a way to run the same cucumber scenario on multiple browsers/web drivers?
Hopefully this will give you some clues.

Answer 3

I am confused by this statement of yours:
Currently I have them running on different machines but the SAME
features do not execute, it just splits up the features and runs
different features on different machines.
parallel_tests is used for splitting up tests and running them on multiple cores, not on a distributed environment of multiple machines. It can group tests to be run on a distributed environment using the --only-group flag, but it doesn't actually run tests on a distributed environment. So you have to do some lifting yourself to get the tests running on a distributed environment. You could run all of your tests on multiple machines like so:
Use net-ssh to ssh into each one of your boxes.
Use each ssh session to run your parallel_tests script (which should break the tests up and run them in parallel on the current box -- just don't use the --only-group option as described here)