Dynamic Agent selection for test runs

Availability Release 4.4.3 Enterprise Edition

ACCELQ Agent is a component of the system which accepts and fulfills test execution requests. This allows remote/local execution of test runs while providing complete access to the application-under-test.

When you are scheduling a job, you typically point the execution towards a named Agent. When the Dynamic Agent feature is available, you can specify a pattern for the Agent name, so that one of the available agents is picked up dynamically at the time of the test run. In other words, you are not hard-wiring a test Job for a specific Agent.

Dynamic Agent Usecases

Here are a few situations Dynamic Agent may be found useful

• When you are creating a job (for future execution), not all agents may be up and running or registered with ACCELQ server.
• You may want to load balance available agents based on running jobs across different projects/users on the system.
• For jobs that are repeat-executed over long durations, such as CI jobs and daily recurring sanity runs, you might want to future-proof the availability or decommissioning of agents over time.

Specifying a Dynamic Agent for a test job

In the Run modal, select the radio option for Dynamic Agent and provide a regular expression pattern for matching Agent name. ACCELQ uses standard Java regex format for the pattern syntax. For example, in the image below, any Agent with a name starting with "qa1_" is selected for test Run.

You may leave the Agent name field blank to pick up any available agent at runtime. 

If multiple matching agents are available during the test run, the system selects one of the Agents based on the current workload against matching Agents. 

Test report will display the actual Agent that was picked up for the specific instance of the Run.

Agent Allocation strategy

When multiple eligible agents are available for a job, ACCELQ optimizes the allocation on several factors. Some of these parameters include:

• If there are any agents with zero allocation
• Relative workload on an agent compared to its threshold as specified in the agent properties
• Comparison based on each agent's ping consistency with the ACCELQ server

Note: This feature is part of ACCELQ's Enterprise Edition. Be sure to check your subscription for applicability.