Parallel Cucumber/Watir scenarios in *Windows*

Any thoughts on what I can do/use to run cucumber scenarios in parallel on Windows? So far, I've tried (with the follow findings):

WatirGrid

Have to use Ruby threads to actually run in "parallel". This forces us to wrap the browser object in a thread, and therefore un-reachable once the thread block closes. (Can't pass Br开发者_运维问答owser object to cucumber environment)

Hydra:

Need SSH (and public-key) access to remote boxes (ie. No Windows)

Selenium Grid:

Super heavy and can't find clear Cucumber testing path

TestJour:

Requires Bonjour (which isn't available for Windows)

---

Re Watirgrid ...

I've since added an iterate method which can be passed a block of watir code to execute against remote browser objects. So the browser objects become reusable between steps. An updated detailed cucumber example is here:

https://github.com/90kts/watirgrid/blob/master/examples/cucumber/step_definitions/example_steps.rb

Your cuke steps end up looking like this:

Given /^navigate to the portal$/ do
  @grid.iterate {|browser| browser.goto "http://gridinit.com/examples/logon.html" }
end

When /^they enter their credentials$/ do
  @grid.iterate do |browser|
    browser.text_field(:name => "email").set "tim@mahenterprize.com"
    browser.text_field(:name => "password").set "mahsecretz"
    browser.button(:type => "submit").click
  end
end

Then /^they should see their account settings$/ do
  @grid.iterate do |browser|
    browser.text.should =~ /Maybe I should get a real Gridinit account/
  end
end

If you have any questions feel free to drop me a line. We also have a commercial implementation of watirgrid on EC2 available for beta at http://gridinit.com/public/examples so stay tuned for more updates with different test frameworks!

FYI the control / iterate helpers are in the latest version of watirgrid v1.1.2

Alternatively to do it in parallel with different scenarios on each of the providers, I would just have a support/env.rb that looks something like this:

require 'watirgrid'
require 'rspec/expectations';

ENV["GRID"] = 'true'
ENV["controller_uri"] = "druby://10.0.1.3:11235"

if ENV["GRID"] then
  params = {}
  params[:controller_uri]   = ENV["controller_uri"]
  params[:browser]          = 'chrome' # type of webdriver browser to spawn
  grid ||= Watir::Grid.new(params)
  grid.start(:initiate => true, :quantity => 1, :take_all => true)
else
  @browser ||= Watir::Browser.new :chrome
end

Before do |scenario|
  @browser = grid.providers.first
end

at_exit do
  grid.iterate do |browser|
    browser.close
  end
  grid.release_tuples
end

Note I'm using :take_all => true to get exclusive access to a provider and releasing it back to the grid at_exit ... I would then call my scenarios from a separate test runner using the CLI, maybe wrapped in a bash or DOS script e.g.

cucumber features --name "Name of scenario 1"
cucumber features --name "Name of scenario 2"
cucumber features --name "Name of scenario 3"
...
etc