Sharing Specflow Feature Files with Multiple Applications

Question

My goal is to be able to write core testing that I can use within a unit testing framework as well as UI testing with selenium.

For simple test like:

Scenario: Add two numbers
Given I have entered 50 into the calculator
And I have entered 70 into the calculator
When I press add
Then the result should be 120

I would create both unit tests to prove that my core API would pass as well as a Selenium test that would prove my UI is doing the correct thing as well.

I briefly tried to find anyone doing something similar through Google, but couldn't find any examples. So I guess my question is, has anyone here done anything similar?

On approach I had thought of was simple adding the feature files to a project or directory and using the add existing item as link as the solution.

Update: Adding feature files to a common directory and adding them as a link appears to be working great. The feature bindings regenerates for each project the feature file was included in so I can run unit tests in one and Selenium UI tests in the other.

Answer 1

First, lets start with why you might want to do this. Its laziness of the good kind.

The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris. (p.609)

Larry Wall, Programming Perl

Except it isn't, because we aren't going to reduce our overall energy expenditure.

When you are using SpecFlow, the easy part to keep up to date is the plain text. You will find yourself refactoring the [Binding]s again and again, but the scenarios tend to be quite easy to work with, and need very little revision once they have been agreed.

In addition the [Binding]s are global. Load them in from any assembly and they are available to the SpecFlow runner. In respect of what you are trying this actually makes things harder as you need to put effort in to keep the UI bindings from being mixed up with the non-UI bindings.

Also consider the way that SpecFlow actually runs the tests from feature files. It's a two stage process.

1. When you save the .feature file the SpecFlow VS plugin generates a .feature.cs file.
2. When you run your test engine (e.g. NUnit) it ignores the plain text and uses compiled code from .feature.cs

So if you start using linked .features I have no idea if the SpecFlow plugin will generate .feature.cs for both instances of the file. (If you try this please let us know)

Second lets consider the features themselves. I think you will constantly finding yourself compromising your tests to make them fit the other place they are used. Already in the example you have given you have on the screen. If you are working with just the core API then there won't be a screen, so do we change this to fit better in a non-UI scenario?

Finally you have another thing to consider, just how useful will your tests be. If you have already got a test that tests the Core API, then what will it mean to run same test via Selenium. All you will really test is the UI layer. In my current employment we have a great number of regression tests that perform this very kind of testing, running up a client that connects to a server and manipulating the UI to get the desired scenarios enacted. These are the most fragile tests we have due to their scale. They constantly break and we basically have to check our entire codebase to find the line that broke them. Often something like 10-100 of them break just for a one line change. If these tests weren't so important to the regression cycle then the effort in maintaining them would just be too much. In my own personal projects I tend to remove these tests completely and instead with UIs, I avoid testing the View layer. With WPF MVVM, I execute Commands and test for results in ViewModels. If somebody then decides the TextBox should be a ComboBox or that it will work better in mauve, then my testing is isolated.

In short, there is a reason you can't find anything about this on Google :-)

Answer 2

In general (see http://martinfowler.com/bliki/TestPyramid.html), one should limit the number of automated tests that test the UI directly, and prefer tests that start at the presentation layer (just below the view layer), or below.

SpecFlow is agnostic; the tests can be implemented using e.g. Selenium at the UI layer or just MSTest or NUnit at any of the layers below.

However having said that I appreciate that you will have situations where you are doing ATDD and want to implement SpecFlow scenarios to match each of the acceptance criteria. Some of the criteria will be perfectly fine to test at a lower architectural level, but one or two of them may be specific to the GUI-- for example testing Login and ensuring that the user is redirected to the home page after successful login. If using Angular2 or React routing (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application), that redirect is likely done in the GUI layer itself.

I don't have a perfect answer yet, but as a certified SpecFlow trainer, I have a vested interest in this! The way I am currently leaning is to use a complementary tool like CucumberJS for the front-end specific tests (such as testing React router redirects) and SpecFlow for tests at lower architectural layers. Our front-end uses Node.JS/Express and our backend is .NET Core. The idea is that the front-end tests mostly use the front-end only with mocked out AJAX calls to the backend (see sinonjs), and the back-end tests use EF Core with the in-memory option (see docs.efproject.net/en/latest/providers/in-memory/. So the tests all run fast.

Of course, you still need a few tests that actually go all the way through, but those are different-- we should call those integration tests. I do not believe that acceptance tests need to be integration tests. That way, you have a suite of acceptance tests from doing ATDD, plus a relatively small set of integration tests that test all the way front-to-back. The integration tests run more slowly and require more maintenance, so you separate them out into a different part of the CI/CD build chain.

I hope this makes sense. It is not so much solving the problem as avoiding the problem.