As any application grows in features, running all automated tests in the continuous integration (CI) environment begins to take a significant amount of time. A slow CI build — anything longer than 10 minutes — takes a toll on everyone’s focus, flow and productivity. How do you move fast when even a trivial update or hotfix takes 15 minutes to reach production? Half an hour? Forty-five minutes?

Today, we’re announcing Semaphore Boosters, a new CI feature that can cut a build’s runtime from over an hour down to just a few minutes by automatically parallelizing your test suite. It drastically speeds up testing, and helps your team get faster feedback, save time, be more productive, and deliver updates to users much more frequently.

What can you expect from using Semaphore Boosters?

Early adopter customers have seen some amazing improvements in productivity:

“Before we started working with Boosters, test times were one of our biggest development bottlenecks. Running our test suite took over 90 minutes, and forced us to try a whole host of clunky workarounds just to try to get quicker feedback. Semaphore Boosters have given us a tremendous time savings — our full suite now runs in just under 16 minutes. Our productivity has increased tremendously, almost doubling our output in terms of tickets we close each week. Using Boosters has really helped our large project feel a lot more nimble to develop!” says Bryce Senz, CIO at Credda.

How does it work?

Watch the video below to see Semaphore Boosters in action:

In the video, we started with an application whose test suite took 8 minutes to run. In only a few clicks, without any change in source code, we configured a CI build that runs in only a minute and half.

Semaphore Boosters monitor your test suite and dynamically distribute your test files across parallel jobs. This ensures best possible performance regardless of how your code changes over time. The only thing that you as a user need to do is select the number of parallel jobs you’d like to run.

Semaphore Boosters currently support Ruby on Rails applications via RSpec and Cucumber. We plan to support other languages and frameworks, which we’ll announce here.

Book a Semaphore Boosters demo to help your team improve productivity and deliver new features faster with automatic parallel testing.

Happy building!