We've got a situation where we have a suite of tests for a web app. It starts of testing the lib/ and whatnot, but eventually gets to the point where it uses Test::WWW::Mechanize to go fetch stuff from the developer's sandbox website and do a sanity check on the web application itself.
The problem is that all the developer sandbox websites run on one server that's groaning under the strain. It's in the process of being replaced but we're not there yet. The upshot of this is that on a good day, the web tests take ages to run, and on a bad day they time out. It's got to the point where the developers just kind of mentally tune out failures in the web tests, and I'm worried about the "broken window" effect. Any suggestions for how to work around this? All I've got so far is the idea of splitting out the web tests into another directory, and treating them as "functional tests" that developers would typically run less often than the unit tests. K.
