Parallel test execution involves running multiple tests simultaneously, significantly reducing the total testing duration.
This method spreads tests across various resources, like multiple CPU cores, threads, or different machines, to execute them simultaneously.
Setup the environment
First, let’s install the following 2 plugins:
pip install pytest-xdist
and
pip install pytest-forked
Check if the plugins were added to your interpreter
How to run multiple tests in parallel
Go to Run/Debug Configurations and add ‘-n 2’ to the Additional Arguments input. In my example, I also have the argument for the final test report (–html=report.html)
In the above example, when I run my test cases the system will create 2 workers. You can imagine a queue, where you have an X number of test scenarios, and each worker will pick the next available one. Change the value after -n to setup a different number of workers. (e.g -n 3 for 3 workers and so on)
How it works
The total number of test cases is based on the count of test_*.py files and the number of data sets in your list.
For instance, if there’s only one test_*.py file and you provide a list with 3 data sets, the total number of tests will be 3. You can then assign 3 workers to run these tests concurrently.