Unboxing and Benchmarking M4 Mac Mini as Test Automation Engineer. Part-2: Analyse & Suggestions *

The results demonstrate that the M4 Mac Mini is an excellent choice for a Continuous Testing Lab.

Continuing from Part 1, the benchmark results provide valuable insights. Before diving into those details, I want to emphasize that my setup of the M4 Mac Mini is not for demonstration purposes; it is intended for real and serious Continuous Testing.

Used in Serious Continuous Testing

After setting up the M4 Mac Mini, I added it to the continuous testing lab (easy) to participate in a run of my father’s WhenWise regression test suite, which includes 572 user-story-level end-to-end (E2E) Selenium tests.

Here is a screenshot of the M4 Mac Mini after completing over 150 Selenium tests in a continuous testing session. (Shared with my father's permission; I believe this marks the first public showcase of the BuildWise Agent in action outside of a demo setting).

Executed over 150 tests on this new M4 Mac Mini. There were a few test failures, which were handled by the BuildWise auto-retry feature. For more, check out my father’s book.

5 Build machines (Mac Mini) reduced nearly 3 hour-test-execution time (if on a single machine) to 42 minutes.

Contrary to the claims of many so-called 'senior test automation engineers' that large-scale E2E (UI) test automation is impossible, this demonstrates the opposite.

Many so-called ‘Test Automation Experts’, like this one, just gave in real test automation. Be aware of them.

Successful E2E automation comes down to skill, well-crafted scripts, the right choices of frameworks & language & tools, as well as discipline and passion. I’ve seen my father consistently achieve this across various projects for over a decade.

By the way, my father has a habit of pushing the build to production right after a successful green run. (see his article, Daily Production Releases Clarified”.

Analyse