QABattle

CI/CD & DevOps / Quiz

Shard Tactics

Splitting a 40-minute suite across runners: balancing by timing, isolating state, merging reports, and the straggler that eats your speedup.

Difficulty
Medium
Format
Quiz
Points
150
Estimate
10 min

// MISSION BRIEF

Your Mission

Parallel sharding is how a 40-minute suite becomes 8 minutes, or how it becomes a flaky mess, depending on execution. This quiz covers split strategies, the independence prerequisite, report merging, and where the speedup ceiling is.

Scoring: timed quiz; accuracy first, speed bonus for fast clean runs.

// FIRST CONTACT

Battle teaser

Test sharding means:

  1. ASplitting one suite across N machines, each running a disjoint subset, e.g. Playwright's --shard=2/4
  2. BDeleting slow tests
  3. CDatabase partitioning for test data
  4. DRunning the full suite N times for confidence
Answers, scoring, hints, and the full battle stay sealed.

// SKILL TAGS

ci-cdparallelizationshardingplaywright