As said before, tests are required to execute quickly. Fast running tests are a necessity for development pipelines providing fast feedback. Especially with the number of tests growing over time by applying continuous improvement, the only way to keep the pipeline effective is to keep test execution time low.

Typically, test execution spends the most time in starting up the test technology. Integration tests in particular, which use an embedded container, consume a lot of startup time. The time spent performing the actual test is in most cases not such a big issue.

Tests that consume a lot of time contradict the idea of continuous improvement of quality. The more test cases and scenarios that are added to the project, the longer the overall test execution and the slower is the feedback. Especially with the challenges of a fast-moving world, software tests need to perform as fast as possible. The rest of this chapter will show you how we can achieve this goal, particularly in regard to end-to-end test scenarios.