Is there a way to speed up AngularJS protractor tests?

Question

I have created tests for my application. Everything works but it runs slow and even though only 1/3 of the application is tested it still takes around ten minutes for protrator to create the test data, fill out the fields, click the submit button etc.

I am using Google Crome for the testing. It seems slow as I watch protractor fill out the fields one by one.

Here's an example of my test suite:

suites: {
    login: ['Login/test.js'],            
    homePage: ['Home/test.js'],          
    adminPage: ['Admin/Home/test.js'],
    adminObjective: ['Admin/Objective/test.js'],
    adminObjDetail: ['Admin/ObjectiveDetail/test.js'],
    adminTopic: ['Admin/Topic/test.js'],
    adminTest: ['Admin/Test/test.js'],
    adminUser: ['Admin/User/test.js'],
    adminRole: ['Admin/Role/test.js']
},

This is one test group:

    login: ['Login/test.js'],            
    homePage: ['Home/test.js'],          
    adminUser: ['Admin/User/test.js'],
    adminRole: ['Admin/Role/test.js']

This is another test group:

    adminPage: ['Admin/Home/test.js'],
    adminObjective: ['Admin/Objective/test.js'],
    adminObjDetail: ['Admin/ObjectiveDetail/test.js'],
    adminTopic: ['Admin/Topic/test.js'],
    adminTest: ['Admin/Test/test.js'],

The two groups can run independently but they must run in the order I have above. After the answers I did read about sharing but I am not sure if this helps my situation as my tests need to be run in order. Ideally I would like to have one set of tests run in one browser and the other set in another browser.

I read about headless browsers such as PhantomJS. Does anyone have experience with these being faster? Any advice on how I could do this would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

We currently use "shardTestFiles: true" which runs our tests in parallel, this could help if you have multiple tests.

I'm not sure what you are testing here, whether its the data creation or the end result. If the latter, you may want to consider mocking the data creation instead or bypassing the UI some other way.

Answer 2

Injecting in Data

One thing that you can do that will give you a major boost in performance is to not double test. What I mean by this is that you end up filling in dummy data a number of times to get to a step. Its also one of the major reasons that people need tests to run in a certain order (to speed up data entry).

An example of this is if you want to test filtering on a grid (data-table). Filling in data is not part of this action. Its just an annoying thing that you have to do to get to testing the filtering. By calling a service to add the data you can bypass the UI and seleniums general slowness (Id also recommend this on the server side by injecting values directly into the DB using migrations).

A nice way to do this is to add a helper to your pageobject as follows:

module.exports = {
    projects: {
        create: function(data) {
            return browser.executeAsyncScript(function(data, callback) {
                var api = angular.injector(['ProtractorProjectsApp']).get('apiService');
                api.project.save(data, function(newItem) {
                    callback(newItem._id);
                })
            }, data);
        }
    }
};

The code in this isnt the cleanest but you get the general gist of it. Another alternative is to replace the module with a double or mock using [Protractor#addMockModule][1]. You need to add this code before you call Protractor#get(). It will load after your application services overriding if it has the same name as an existing service.

You can use it as follows :

var dataUtilMockModule = function () {
     // Create a new module which depends on your data creation utilities
    var utilModule = angular.module('dataUtil', ['platform']);
    // Create a new service in the module that creates a new entity
    utilModule.service('EntityCreation', ['EntityDataService', '$q', function (EntityDataService, $q) {

        /**
         * Returns a promise which is resolved/rejected according to entity creation success
         * @returns {*}
         */
        this.createEntity = function (details,type) {
            // This is your business logic for creating entities
            var entity = EntityDataService.Entity(details).ofType(type);
            var promise = entity.save();
            return promise;
        };
    }]);
};

browser.addMockModule('dataUtil', dataUtilMockModule);

Either of these methods should give you a significant speedup in your testing.

Sharding Tests

Sharding the tests means splitting up the suites and running them in parallel. To do this is quite simple in protractor. Adding the shardTestFiles and maxInstences to your capabilities config should allow you to (in this case) run at most two test in parrallel. Increase the maxInstences to increase the number of tests run. Note : be careful not to set the number too high. Browsers may require multiple threads and there is also an initialisation cost in opening new windows.

capabilities: {
    browserName: 'chrome',
    shardTestFiles: true,
    maxInstances: 2
},

Setting up PhantomJS (from protractor docs)

Note: We recommend against using PhantomJS for tests with Protractor. There are many reported issues with PhantomJS crashing and behaving differently from real browsers.

In order to test locally with PhantomJS, you'll need to either have it installed globally, or relative to your project. For global install see the PhantomJS download page (http://phantomjs.org/download.html). For local install run: npm install phantomjs.

Add phantomjs to the driver capabilities, and include a path to the binary if using local installation:

capabilities: {
  'browserName': 'phantomjs',

  /* 
   * Can be used to specify the phantomjs binary path.
   * This can generally be ommitted if you installed phantomjs globally.
   */
  'phantomjs.binary.path': require('phantomjs').path,

  /*
   * Command line args to pass to ghostdriver, phantomjs's browser driver.
   * See https://github.com/detro/ghostdriver#faq
   */
  'phantomjs.ghostdriver.cli.args': ['--loglevel=DEBUG']
}