A Service Framework for Parallel Test Execution on a Developer's Local Development Workstation

The proliferation of distributed microservices driven by service oriented architecture and the effectiveness of agile software development processes such as Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), inspired by extreme programming (XP), have driven the challenging necessity to receive prompt test feedback during software development iteratively. Although few test frameworks can execute unit tests in memory in parallel, no existing test frameworks can reliably perform parallel execution for the tests that rely on file system access, database fixtures and network communication. Isolated test execution environment with dedicated resources is a prerequisite to address these challenges. No previous research addresses this need to run groups of tests in parallel on the same development host. In this paper, to cut down test execution time, we present a service framework for parallel tests execution in a developer's containerized sandbox using operating system level virtualization provided by Docker, the new hot driver for Platform as a Service (PaaS).