We got a 6-year-old Rails app with ~370k LOC and a ~6k-test suite which took 24 minutes to complete. Not good! We took a few days off of the main project to see if we could make things better.

More often than not, test suites are the nasty underbelly of a Rails app. Size and age just aggravate the problem. Tests are seldom a high priority in any project, and speed might not be an issue at all in smaller apps where the whole test suite might take just a few seconds to complete. As the project grows and the CI takes increasingly longer to complete, spec speed suddenly becomes more of an issue.

“Small” and “new” are not exactly the case for a certain Rails project we’re working on here at Guava. We’re talking about a 6-year-old e-commerce portal with ~370k LOC, a couple million customers and a ~6k-test, 300-spec suite which took, on average, a whopping 24 minutes to complete in our CI. Not good! So we took a couple of days off the main project to see if we could make things better — or less worse.