How to tell Spock which class to run in specific order

Question

Im using Spock for my tests and I have multiple classes to test. I want to tell Spock to test each class in specific order. Is there a way to do this? I noticed TestNG has got @AfterTest annotation, so does Spock have something similar?

Donegal

You mean you have multiple Specifications? Or multiple tests in a Specification? – Absentee

I have multiple classes that extends Specification – Donegal

If your test suite depends on the order of specs and specs depend on the order of feature methods (FM), your test suite is broken. Stay away from that. A spec is to be independent of other specs, a FM is to be independent of other FMs in the same spec. I am an agile coach and in one of my last projects there was a massive Spock/Geb test suite with thousands of tests, and in exactly one very complex Geb integration test we had @Stepwise in action because it tested a long page flow including external systems hosted by partners. And BTW, we still felt bad about @Stepwise. – Luz

You have 2 separate questions. One has to do with spec order and the other has to do with @AfterTest. The spec order has been answered below. "I noticed TestNG has got @AfterTest annotation, so does Spock have something similar?" - You probably want @AfterClass. An alternative is to have a method named cleanupSpec() in your spec. – Amphitropous

Answer 1

You can't specify Spock test classes execution order. However Spock allows you to specify methods execution order when you add @Stepwise annotation to your test class - in this case Spock will execute all methods in order from top to bottom and if one method fails it will ignore remaining methods in this test class.

Indicates that a spec's feature methods should be run sequentially in their declared order (even in the presence of a parallel spec runner), always starting from the first method. If a method fails, the remaining methods will be skipped. Feature methods declared in super- and subspecs are not affected.

@Stepwise is useful for specs with (logical) dependencies between methods. In particular, it helps to avoid consecutive errors after a method has failed, which makes it easier to understand what really went wrong.

Reference: http://spockframework.org/spock/javadoc/1.1/spock/lang/Stepwise.html

@Stepwise
class StepwiseExample extends Specification {

    def "first test method to run"() {
        // ....
    }
    
    def "second test method to run"() {
        // ....
    }
    
    def "if previous method failed this one will be ignored"() {
        // ....
    }
}

Using org.junit.runners.Suite

Jeff Scott Brown gave a good comment about JUnit's @Suite.SuiteClasses. In this case you create a class where you can aggregate your test classes (specifications) into a single test suite and those classes will be executed in the order they have been defined in the suite. Consider following example:

import org.junit.runner.RunWith
import org.junit.runners.Suite

@RunWith(Suite)
@Suite.SuiteClasses([
        Test2Specification,
        Test1Specification
])
class TestSuiteSpecification { }

This suite executes two specifications Test2Specification and Test1Specification in the defined order:

Cavorelievo

thanks @Szymon, I already use Stepwise. it runs tests in order that I want but it doesn't run the classes in the order that I want, so I'm afraid this is not what I need. sorry for not being clear. – Donegal

@Donegal This is the only ordered execution you can achieve with Spock. You cannot specify the order of test classes (specifications) as I mentioned in the first paragraph. And basically you shouldn't design your tests to run in specific order - each unit test runs in isolation and it should not depend on side effects from other tests. – Cavorelievo

@SzymonStepniak "This is the only ordered execution you can achieve with Spock." - Does a Suite marked with @SuiteClasses no longer work? – Amphitropous

@JeffScottBrown Thanks Jeff for the comment. You're right, using @SuiteClasses might work for the OP. Thx! – Cavorelievo