Selenium Grid

What is Selenium-Grid?
Selenium-Grid allows you run your tests on different machines against different browsers in parallel. That is, running multiple tests at the same time against different machines running different browsers and operating systems. Essentially, Selenium-Grid support distributed test execution. It allows for running your tests in a distributed test execution environment.

When to Use It ?
Generally speaking, there’s two reasons why you might want to use Selenium-Grid.

To run your tests against multiple browsers, multiple versions of browser, and browsers running on different operating systems.
To reduce the time it takes for the test suite to complete a test pass.
Selenium-Grid is used to speed up the execution of a test pass by using multiple machines to run tests in parallel. For example, if you have a suite of 100 tests, but you set up Selenium-Grid to support 4 different machines (VMs or separate physical machines) to run those tests, your test suite will complete in (roughly) one-fourth the time as it would if you ran your tests sequentially on a single machine. For large test suites, and long-running test suite such as those performing large amounts of data-validation, this can be a significant time-saver. Some test suites can take hours to run. Another reason to boost the time spent running the suite is to shorten the turnaround time for test results after developers check-in code for the AUT. Increasingly software teams practicing Agile software development want test feedback as immediately as possible as opposed to wait overnight for an overnight test pass.

Selenium-Grid is also used to support running tests against multiple runtime environments, specifically, against different browsers at the same time. For example, a ‘grid’ of virtual machines can be setup with each supporting a different browser that the application to be tested must support. So, machine 1 has Internet Explorer 8, machine 2, Internet Explorer 9, machine 3 the latest Chrome, and machine 4 the latest Firefox. When the test suite is run, Selenium-Grid receives each test-browser combination and assigns each test to run against its required browser.

In addition, one can have a grid of all the same browser, type and version. For instance, one could have a grid of 4 machines each running 3 instances of Firefox 12, allowing for a ‘server-farm’ (in a sense) of available Firefox instances. When the suite runs, each test is passed to Selenium-Grid which assigns the test to the next available Firefox instance. In this manner one gets test pass where conceivably 12 tests are all running at the same time in parallel, significantly reducing the time required to complete a test pass.

Selenium-Grid is very flexible. These two examples can be combined to allow multiple instances of each browser type and version. A configuration such as this would provide both, parallel execution for fast test pass completion and support for multiple browser types and versions simultaneously.

Source : www.seleniumhq.org