Cucumber employs Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) for testing your application. This type of test is often time-consuming when running in the browser. You will learn how to run Cucumber tests on Github Actions using parallel jobs to execute the test suite much faster.

Github Actions Matrix Strategy

You can use the Github Actions matrix strategy to run parallel jobs. You will need to divide your Cucumber test files between the parallel jobs in a way that work will be balanced out between the jobs.

It’s not that simple to do because often Cucumber tests can take a different amount of time. One test file can have many test cases, the other can have only a few but very complex ones, etc.

There are often more steps in your CI pipeline like installing dependencies, loading data from the cache and each step can take a different amount of time per parallel job before even Cucumber tests are started. The steps affect the overall CI build speed.

What you would like to achieve is to run parallel jobs in a way that they always finish the execution of Cucumber tests at a similar time. Thanks to that you will avoid lagging jobs that could be a bottleneck in your CI build.

#testing #github