How to make a feature run before other

Question

I have two cucumber feature ( DeleteAccountingYear.feature and AddAccountingYear.feature). How can i do to make that the second feature(AddAccountingYear.feature) run before the first one (AddAccountingYear.feature).

Answer 1

From Justin Ko's website - https://jkotests.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/specify-execution-order-of-cucumber-features/ the run order is determined in the following way:

1. Alphabetically by feature file directory
2. Alphabetically by feature file name
3. Order of scenarios within the feature file

So to run one feature before the other you could change the name of the feature file or put it in a separate feature folder with a name that alphabetically first.

However, it is good practice to make all of your tests independent of one another. One of the easiest way to do this is to use mocks to create your data (i.e. the date you want to delete), but that isn't always an option. Another way would be to create the data you want to delete in the set up of the delete tests. The downside to doing this is that it's a duplication of effort, but it won't matter what order the tests run in. This may not be an issue now, but with a larger test suite and/or multiple coders using the test repo it may be difficult to maintain the test ordering based solely on alphabetical sorting.

Another option would be to combine the add and delete tests. This goes against the general rule that one test should test one thing but is often a pragmatic approach if your tests take a long time to run and adding the add data step to the set up for delete would add a lot of time to your test suite.

Edit: After reading that link to Justin Ko's site you can specify the features that are run when you run cucumber, and it will run them in the order that you give. For any that you don't care about the order for you can just put the whole feature folder at the end and cucumber will run through them, skipping any that have already been run. Copy paste example from the link above -

cucumber features\folder2\another.feature features\folder1\some.feature features

Answer 2

I concur with @alannichols about tests being independent of each other. Thats a fundamental aspect of automation suite. Otherwise we will end up with a unmaintainable, flaky test suite.

To run a certain feature file before running another feature appears to me like a test design issue.

Cucumber provides few options to solve issues like this:

a) Is DeleteAccountingYear.feature really a feature of its own? If not you can use the cucumber Background: option. The steps provided in the background will be run for each scenario in that feature file. So your AddAccountingYear.feature will look like this:

Feature: AddingAccountingYear

  Background:
    Given I have deleted accounting year

  Scenario Outline: add new accounting year
    Then I add new account year

b) If DeleteAccountingYear.feature is indeed a feature of its own and needs to be in its own feature file, then you can use setup and teardown functions. In cucumber this can be achieved using hooks. You can tag AddDeleteAccountingYear.feature with a certain tag say @doAfterDeleteAccountYear. Now from the Before hooks you can do the required setup for this specific tag. The before hooks(for ruby) will look like:

Before('@doAfterDeleteAccountYear') do
  #Call the function to delete the account year
end

If the delete account year is written as a function, then the only thing required is to call this method in the before hook. This way the code will be DRY compliant as well.

If these options doesn't work for you, one another way of forcing the order of execution is by using a batch/shell script. You can add individual cucumber commands for each feature in the order you would like to execute and then just execute the script. The downside of it is different reports will be generated for each feature file. But this is something that I wouldn't recommend for the reasons mentioned above.