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Harness CI Intelligence

Harness Continuous Integration (CI) Intelligence features are designed to smartly speed up builds and boost efficiency.

Test Intelligence

Testing is an important part of Continuous Integration. Testing safeguards the quality of your product before shipping. However, test cycles often involve many tests, and it can take a significant amount of time for the tests to run. Additionally, the tests that run might be irrelevant to the code changes that triggered the build.

Harness Test Intelligence (TI) helps your test cycle move faster without compromising quality. TI can dramatically improve test times by running only the unit tests required to confirm the quality of the code changes that triggered the build.Instead of always running all unit tests, TI selects the subset of relevant unit tests and skips the rest. You can also configure Harness TI to automatically split tests and run them in parallel.

Test Intelligence gives you full visibility into which tests were selected and why. This can help you identify negative trends and gain insights to improve test quality and coverage. Using TI doesn't require you to change your build and test processes.

To learn more about the Test Intelligence architecture, how it works, and how to enable it, go to Test Intelligence overview.

While Test Intelligence is only for unit tests, you can run a variety of tests in your CI pipelines.

Example: Time and cost savings with Test Intelligence

We ran Test Intelligence on our biggest repository, Harness-Core. Here's what we achieved:

  • PRs checked: 3000
  • Average UT time without TI: 75 minutes
  • Average UT time with TI: 25 minutes

Here's how Harness Test Intelligence performed with some popular open-source repositories:

Project nameAverage test run time without TIAverage test run time with TI
Harness-Core75 mins25 mins
Incubator Pinot338 mins228 mins
Hudi58 mins43 mins
RocketMQ4.6 mins3.1 mins
Spring Cloud Alibaba0.744 mins0.59 mins
Incubator Shenyu1.16 min0.4 min
Sentinel1.90 min1 min

Cache Intelligence

Modern continuous integration systems execute pipelines inside ephemeral environments that are provisioned solely for pipeline execution and are not reused from prior pipeline runs. As builds often require downloading and installing many library and software dependencies, caching these dependencies for quick retrieval at runtime can save a significant amount of time.

With Cache Intelligence, Harness automatically caches and restores software dependencies to speed up your builds - hassle free.

You can use Cache Intelligence with any build infrastructure.

When you use Cache Intelligence with Harness CI Cloud, the cache is stored in the Harness-managed environment. When running builds in self-managed infrastructures, configure S3-compatible default object storage that Harness can use to seamlessly store and manage the cache.

Docker Layer Caching (DLC)

In modern CI systems, Docker images are frequently built in ephemeral environments, created solely for pipeline execution.

With Docker Layer Caching (DLC), Harness seamlessly caches Docker image layers between builds to significantly accelerate the time it takes to build Docker images.

You can use DLC with any build infrastructure.

When you use DLC with Harness CI Cloud, the cache is stored in the Harness-managed environment. When running builds in self-managed infrastructures, configure S3-compatible default object storage that Harness can use to seamlessly store and manage the cache.