/// Selenium Grid alternative

Run Selenium in parallel without a Selenium Grid

A Grid is a hub, nodes, a version matrix to babysit, and a hub outage that takes every suite down at once. L3git writes you a Jenkins Matrix pipeline instead: shards × browsers, every cell on a Jenkins agent you already own, each running only its slice of a plain Cucumber + Selenium suite. Same tests, no Grid.

Grid vs. your own agents

What L3git writes for you

Jenkins needs matrix axes written literally into the Jenkinsfile — they cannot come from a build parameter. So the tool asks at generate time and writes them. Four shards × Edge and Chrome gives you this (trimmed):

// Jenkins MATRIX pipeline for Checkout - generated by L3git.
pipeline {
  agent none
  stages { stage('Matrix') { matrix {
    axes {
      axis { name 'SHARD';   values '1', '2', '3', '4' }
      axis { name 'BROWSER'; values 'edge', 'chrome' }
    }
    agent { label 'ui-test' }
    environment { SHARDS = '4'; HEALING_BROWSER = "${BROWSER}"; HEALING_HEADLESS = 'true' }
    stages { stage('Test') { steps { script {
      // ShardSelector returns a Cucumber tag expression naming this cell's scenarios
      def shard = sh(script: "java -cp target/test-classes com.example.support.ShardSelector ${SHARD}/${SHARDS}", returnStdout: true).trim()
      sh "mvn -B test -Dcucumber.filter.tags=\"${shard}\""
    } } } }
    post { always { junit 'target/surefire-reports/*.xml' } }
  } } }
}

Eight cells run at once. Blue Ocean shows them as a grid; JUnit merges them into one report. TAGS stays a build parameter and combines with the shard.

How the move works

Why the split is safe to rely on

Who moves off the Grid

• Teams whose Grid is the flakiest part of the pipeline — session timeouts, node drift, the Friday hub restart.
• Teams paying cloud-grid minutes for parallelism their own Jenkins agents could give them for free.
• Government and air-gapped programs that cannot reach a cloud grid and would rather not run a hub inside the enclave.

Compared with other approaches

Common questions