One of the main problems you hear people talking about with Selenium is how long it takes to run all of their tests; I have heard figures ranging from a couple of hours to a couple of days. In this chapter, we will have a look at how we can speed things up and get the tests that you are writing to run both quickly and regularly.

Another problem that you may come across is getting other people to run your tests; this is usually because it is a pain to set up the project to work on their machine and it's too much effort for them. As well as making things run quickly, we are going to make it very easy for others to check out your code and get themselves up and running.

How does this create a fast feedback loop?  

Well, first of all, allow me to explain what a fast feedback loop is. As developers change or refactor code, it's possible that they may make a mistake and break something. The feedback loop starts off when they commit code and is complete when they know whether their code changes have worked as expected, or something has been broken. We want to make this feedback loop as fast as possible, so ideally a developer will be running all of the tests that are available before every check in. They will then know whether the changes they made to the code have broken something before the code leaves their machine.

Eventually, we want to get to the point where developers are updating tests that fail because the functionality has changed as they go. The eventual code to turn the tests into living documentation, we will talk about a bit more about in Chapter 2, Producing the Right Feedback When Failing.

In this chapter, we are going to start by creating a basic test framework. What am I going to need? The software and browser versions used to write the code in this chapter are as follows:

• Java SDK 8
• Maven 3.5.3
• Chrome 66
• Firefox 60

It's a good idea to make sure that you atleast update to these versions to make sure everything works for you.