Is there a way to speed up AngularJS protractor tests? - angularjs

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']
}

Answer 3

Another speed tip I've found is that for every test I was logging in and logging out after the test is done. Now I check if I'm already logged in with the following in my helper method;
# Login to the system and make sure we are logged in.
login: ->
browser.get("/login")
element(By.id("username")).isPresent().then((logged_in) ->
if logged_in == false
element(By.id("staff_username")).sendKeys("admin")
element(By.id("staff_password")).sendKeys("password")
element(By.id("login")).click()
)

Answer 4

I'm using grunt-protractor-runner v0.2.4 which uses protractor ">=0.14.0-0 <1.0.0".
This version is 2 or 3 times faster than the latest one (grunt-protractor-runner#1.1.4 depending on protractor#^1.0.0)
So I suggest you to give a try and test a previous version of protractor
Hope this helps

Answer 5

Along with the great tips found above I would recommend disabling Angular/CSS Animations to help speed everything up when they run in non-headless browsers. I personally use the following code in my Test Suite in the "onPrepare" function in my 'conf.js' file:
onPrepare: function() {
var disableNgAnimate = function() {
angular
.module('disableNgAnimate', [])
.run(['$animate', function($animate) {
$animate.enabled(false);
}]);
};
var disableCssAnimate = function() {
angular
.module('disableCssAnimate', [])
.run(function() {
var style = document.createElement('style');
style.type = 'text/css';
style.innerHTML = '* {' +
'-webkit-transition: none !important;' +
'-moz-transition: none !important' +
'-o-transition: none !important' +
'-ms-transition: none !important' +
'transition: none !important' +
'}';
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(style);
});
};
browser.addMockModule('disableNgAnimate', disableNgAnimate);
browser.addMockModule('disableCssAnimate', disableCssAnimate);
}
Please note: I did not write the above code, I found it online while looking for ways to speed up my own tests.

Answer 6

From what I know:
run test in parallel
inject data in case you are only testing a UI element
use CSS selectors, no xpath (browsers have a native engine for CSS, and the xpath engine is not performance as CSS engine)
run them on high performant machines
use as much as possible beforeAll() and beforeEach() methods for instructions that you repeat often in multiple test

Answer 7

Using Phantomjs will considerably reduce the duration it takes in GUI based browser, but better solution I found is to manage tests in such a way that it can be run in any order independently of other tests, It can be achieved easily by use of ORM(jugglingdb, sequelize and many more) and TDB frameworks, and to make them more manageable one can use jasmine or cucumber framework, which has before and after hookups for individual tests. So now we can gear up with maximum instances our machine can bear with "shardTestFiles: true".