What is best practice for test sharding for secure web-based apps?

Question

I'm using Protractor and Jasmine to conduct e2e tests on a secure web app. My suite consists of 100+ specs. I've implemented sharding with a single user account but the specs overlap and so fail unexpectedly.

Given the scale of the current suite, it seems unreasonable to create a user account per spec. The time and space that this would consume would continue to grow proportional to the suite, and I want to minise these costs as much as possible.

Could anyone help me by providing resources tailored to secure web apps? The following topics are of particular interest:

• e2e Test automation architecture
• How best to isolate e2e automated tests
• e2e Test sharding best practice

I've found the following resources helpful, though with limited information on sharding secure web apps.

• https://github.com/CarmenPopoviciu/protractor-styleguide
• https://github.com/bolshchikov-public/protractor-best-practices/blob/master/Performance.md#sharding

Answer 1

I had a very similar problem once. The solution we went for is

1. categorising every spec into what changes it makes that will affect other specs.
2. Then grouping specs together that will not interfere with each other.
3. Finally create different test users for every group.

This is still some overhead, but can drastically reduce the number of test users needed.