On NetTuts.com today there's a new tutorial showing you how to use ParaTest for PHPUnit to execute your tests in parallel instead of the usual inline, in-order method.

PHPUnit has hinted at parallelism since 2007, but, in the meantime, our tests continue to run slowly. Time is money, right? ParaTest is a tool that sits on top of PHPUnit and allows you to run tests in parallel without the use of extensions. This is an ideal candidate for functional (i.e Selenium) tests and other long-running processes.

ParaTest operates as a separate binary that can easily be installed via Composer. They walk you through the install and show you what kind of options it lets you provide (like number of processes and the path to the PHPUnit executable). They show you how to write some parallel tests, five of them, each that sleeps for a certain amount of time. They also look at another tool that could help run your tests in parallel, Paraunit. They finish off the post with a look at some functional testing examples using Selenium, handling race conditions and some of the future plans for ParaTest's future.

On his "Let's BDD" blog Shashikant Jagtap looks at the integration of Saucelabs and Behat for even more functionality when creating BDD tests.

On the occasion of Selenium Conference, I met with Noah Sussman talking about “Selenium In the Enterprise: What Went Right, What Went Wrong (So Far)” and one of his slides indicated that, team using Behat and Mink for the functional testing at Etsy. Noah then introduced me to Laura Beth who setup Behat/Mink and SauceLabs integration. Behat-Sauce configuration by Laura Beth is very easy to use. Now, we will see this in action.

Shashikant shows how to clone the github repository for the behat-suacelabs tool Etsy uses, use Composer to get all of the needed dependencies and a sample set of tests showing a sample set of Scenarios and their matching features (code). You can watch a video of the result here.