Skip to main content

Improving the execution time of CI pipelines


Executing a large number of tests, especially integration tests, takes a lot of time. For instance, the pipeline of one of our projects for each Pull Request previously took nearly 30 minutes, including over 1 thousand test cases. This article guides you through several good techniques that we have discovered and applied to improve the time-consuming process.

Parallel stages


Analyze the current phases in your pipeline and categorize them in parallel. For example, we can separate the build and verify code of Node.js and Maven modules simultaneously in our Jenkins pipelines. Please mind using the setting failFast whether you want to abort the pipeline immediately.


Parallel test execution

If you use Maven, the plugin maven-failsafe-plugin is used to execute integration tests during phases integration-test and verify the build lifecycle. It allows us to execute tests in parallel. There are many settings related to parallel test execution, so make sure to configure them correctly for your environment. For example, we can execute tests in parallel using the classes mode and set threadCount=7 for the Jenkins Agent with 8 CPU cores.


Application profiles

There are certain integration tests that don't require the use of a database. These tests focus on scenarios like error handling, authentication filters, or loading configuration. For example, initializing the database with Testcontainers is time-consuming.  If you use Spring Boot, you can utilize a different profile and use the H2 in-memory database for these tests. The test class will be annotated with the @ActiveProfiles annotation to run with the specified profile.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Google I/O 2017 Notes

WOW! How meaningful this below video explains about the name of  "I/O". Sundar Pichai talked a lot of Machine Learning Machine Learning is a very hot trend these days. Google uses it for their products. Google Assistant: Easily booking an online meal by talking with Google Assistant like a staff of partners, for example. Google Home: Hands-free calling. Google Photos: sharing suggestion, shared library, photo books and google lens. Youtube: 360 degree video, live stream. Kotlin became an official programming language for Android https://kotlinlang.org I'm on the way to Kotlin! ^^ Reference: [1]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2VF8tmLFHw

How I did customize "rasa-nlu-trainer" as my own tool

Check out my implementation here Background I wanted to have a tool for human beings to classify intents and extract entities of texts which were obtained from a raw dataset such as Rocket.chat's conversation, Maluuba Frames or  here . Then, the output (labeled texts) could be consumed by an NLU tool such as Rasa NLU. rasa-nlu-trainer was a potential one which I didn't need to build an app from scratch. However, I needed to add more of my own features to fulfill my needs. They were: 1. Loading/displaying raw texts stored by a database such as MongoDB 2. Manually labeling intents and entities for the loaded texts 3. Persisting labeled texts into the database I firstly did look up what rasa-nlu-trainer 's technologies were used in order to see how to implement my mentioned features. At first glance rasa-nlu-trainer was bootstrapped with Create React App. Create React App is a tool to create a React app with no build configuration, as it said. This too...

Junit - Test fails on French or German string assertion

In my previous post about building a regex to check a text without special characters but allow German and French . I met a problem that the unit test works fine on my machine using Eclipse, but it was fail when running on Jenkins' build job. Here is my test: @Test public void shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters(){ String source = "ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ"; assertFalse(SpecialCharactersUtils.isExistSpecialCharater(source)); } Production code: public static boolean isExistNotAllowedCharacters(String source){ Pattern regex = Pattern.compile("^[a-zA-Z_0-9_ÄäÖöÜüß áÁàÀâÂéÉèÈêÊîÎçÇ]*$"); Matcher matcher = regex.matcher(source); return !matcher.matches(); } The result likes the following: Failed tests: SpecialCharactersUtilsTest.shouldAllowFrenchAndGermanCharacters:32 null A guy from stackoverflow.com says: "This is probably due to the default encoding used for your Java source files. The ö in the string literal in the J...

BIRT - Fix the size of an image

I use a dynamic image as a logo my report in pdf. At the beginning, I use table to align the logo in left or right. I meet a problem with some images with a large width or height. My customer requires that the logo should be displayed in original size. These following steps solves my problem: 1. Use Grid instead of Table 2. Set Grid "Height" is 100%  and "Width" is blank 3. Set "Fit to container" for images are "true". Download the the template here .

JSF 2 - Dynamically manipulating the component tree with system events

Let's suppose we want to modify the metadata (attributes)  of elements such as render , requried , maxlength but we do not define in JSF tags. The manipulating components can be conducted in Drools  files, for example. How could we do? I think that is what we need to change something of component tree during JSF life-cycle. JSF supports event handling throughout the JSF life-cycle. In this post, I use two events: postAddToView for scanning components tree and preRenderView for manipulating the meta of components before rendering to GUI. I modified my own project from previous post for this example. This is my first further JSF trying out with the project as I said before. :) We define the tags f:event below the form - a container component of the components which we want to work on. The valid values for the attribute type for f:event can be found from tag library document  of JSF 2. <!DOCTYPE html> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" x...