Learn how the RentPath team is using headless in their CD pipeline for rent.com. They run tests against each push to GitHub in headless, leveraging the lower cost of headless containers through Sauce Labs for greater concurrency. For multi-browser testing, the team relies on traditional Sauce Labs VMs for nightly regression runs and to check new builds more thoroughly prior to release. In this presentation, John and Abdur outline the speed advantage that headless testing provides, the challenges the RentPath team has overcome, and the tweaks they’ve had to make to the tests for headless

1. Headless Testing

2. Test faster without losing your head
The Story
Automation Engineers
John Theodore
and Abdur Jubair

3. Way back in 2015...
● Release once per sprint
● Running nightly regression
● All bugs would make it to QA, first place we tested them
● Too many hotfixes

4. The goals...
● Release multiple times per day
● Push more code through the pipeline with greater confidence
● Quickly get test results and feedback

5. Roadmap to success
● 100% automated coverage
● Continuous testing and delivery
● Reliable pipeline that allows us to deliver quality code quickly

6. … but we’ve got Prawblems
● Selenium UI tests are slow and brittle
● Tests take too long and frustrate
developers
● Non-deterministic failures
● VMs are costly

7. What about
Headless?

8. Sounds great but…...
● Coverage gaps
● Stability
● Maintenance

9. Nothing is free
● Hurdles we had to consider
○ Web elements that don’t render in headless
○ Test structure and stability
○ Memory capacity

10. Where we are now

11. Headless Mode to the Rescue
● Headless containers are lighter weight
● Much faster
● Headless containers cost less

12. Headless Success
● Multiples releases of same app weekly
● Minimal hotfixes
● No critical bugs to staging
● Faster results in under 7 minutes
● Happier Team

13. Would we recommend
headless?

14. Let’s Connect
John Theodore
● Twitter: @john_a_theodore
● Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-theodore-b68aa74/
● Twitch: https://twitch.tv/john_a_theodore
● YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/JohnTheodore
Abdur Jubair
● Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abdur-r-jubair-85748767/