How can i specify an order in mink/behat tests?

Question

I'm using mink/behat to test my website. I need certain features be executed before others. Is there a way to specify an order of execution?

For example: There are 3 features: Administration, Login, Buy I need to execute them in this order: Login, Administration, Buy

Thank you!

Mantoman

Answer 1

Behat executes files in an alphabetic order. You could prefix them with a number to force the order.

However...

Scenarios are meant to be independent and the execution order shouldn't matter.

Marozik

How would you then test very common use case of website that has to register user in order to use the same user in later tests? I know I can put user in fixtures, but that also shouldn't be a point. Also registering him in beginning of every feature is overkill. – Hanway

@Hanway that's a new question, so you should ideally post it as a new question. However, you can handle that with a beforeSuite function in your context or by having a mock user created as some other pre-testing step. There are more answers I'd give if you posted a question ;) – Bounty

It "shouldn't" matter does not mean it "could" matter - and you will only find out if the case is that you do have dependencies unless you have good isolation of tests - or you regularly run in random order. Preferably both. – Cantrell

Answer 2

behat now allows you to specify an order from the existing Orderer implementations:

vendor/bin/behat --order=[random|reverse|null]

so for randon:

vendor/bin/behat --order=random

I believe you could also write your own. If you wish to control the order in terms of batches, e.g. set x scenarios need to run before set y this could be achieved by just tags and running the two separate suites in sequence.

Cantrell