Controlling Test Execution Order in Serenity BDD (Serenity 4 with JUnit 4)

[SrivaniChennupati]

@wakaleo : We recently migrated to Serenity 4 with JUnit 4, and we are looking for ways to control the order of execution of our test scenarios. Currently, our tests run in an unpredictable order, and we need a way to define a specific sequence.

Could you please confirm if there’s a built-in way to control execution order in Serenity BDD?

[wakaleo]

This is not possible by design in JUnit (relying on test execution order can mean you have dependencies between your tests), but in JUnit 5 you can use the Order annotation for that.

[SrivaniChennupati]

@wakaleo Since we can define the @order annotation at the method level , which applies to test methods, will that help us control the execution order of scenarios in serenity BDD feature files ?

I upgraded JUnit from version 4 to 5 in our Serenity BDD pom.xml. Now, the @order annotation can be defined at the step definition class level. I was wondering if this can control the execution order of feature files or scenarios in my feature files.

[wakaleo]

No, the order annotation is a JUnit 5 annotation. BDD scenarios are executed in order of appearance in the feature file, unless you run them in parallel (in which case the order is not determined).

There are a few hacks you can do to control the order of execution of the feature files themselves, byt wanting to do so is usually a red flag that your scenarios or features have dependencies, which leads to brittle test suites.