How do you run SpecFlow scenarios from the command line using MSTest?

Question

I've got Visual Studio 2010, and we have two VS solutions we work with. The first is the web application, and the second is strictly for SpecFlow tests. Having two instances of Visual Studio running at the same time just to run SpecFlow features is eating all the available RAM causing things to slow down.

I've done some searching on Google and here on StackOverflow, plus perused the MS documentation on the MSTest command line tool, but I haven't found the answer. The full SpecFlow test suite takes ~45 minutes to complete, and I really only need to run a few scenarios.

I was wondering if there is a way to run individual SpecFlow features, and even individual scenarios, from the command line using MSTest?

Answer 1

Behind the scene specflow tests are just regular mstest unit tests. So you should be able to run them the same way using something like:

To run a specific scenario:

mstest /testcontainer:tests.dll /test:GivenMyScenarioWhenIDoSomeStuff

To run a several specific scenario you can use the /test flag multiple times:

mstest /testcontainer:tests.dll /test:GivenMyScenarioWhenIDoSomeStuff /test:GivenMyScenarioWhenIDoSomemthingElse

To run a feature

mstest /testcontainer:tests.dll /test:MyFeatureName

If you add tags on your scenarios using @MyTag for example, you could also use the option

/category:MyTag to filter down the scenarios to run.

Please have a look to the generated code behind of your feature files to get a clue of how things actually work, if you are familliar with mstest it should be pretty straightforward.

Answer 2

Now that SpecFlow 3.0 has been released we can use SpecFlow with .NET Core. The CLI tool for .NET Core is dotnet and tests are run like this if you use MSTest (vstest):

dotnet test

If the tests are in a specific project you can specify the project like this

dotnet test TestProject

where TestProject is the name of the project. You can skip the project name if you want to, but specifying it will make dotnet look in only that project. To list all the tests in the project you can use the -t flag:

dotnet test TestProject -t

To run only specific tests you can use the --filter flag:

dotnet test TestProject --filter ShouldBeSuccess_1

where ShouldBeSuccess_1 is the name of the test. The argument after --filter is an expression, and not necessary the name of the test If you had a test called ShouldBeSuccess_12 it would also run. You can see the rules for --filter here.

To only run the tests in a specific category you can use TestCategory:

dotnet test TestProject --filter TestCategory=ci

where ci is the category name. To add a test to a category you use tags.

To create the results file you have to use the --logger flag:

dotnet test TestProject --logger trx

Here it's used to create a trx results file.

Answer 3

There is a nuget package named "Specrun.Specflow" download that. And it will change your app.config and set unitTestProvider name="SpecRun", so you can remove unitTestProvider name="MSTest" or "NUnit", now on saving App.config changes, visual studio prompts you to regenerate your feature files, click on Yes and now build a solution, What you will see is your test files have been regenerated. Now in your Command Prompt go to C:\Users\\Documents\Visual Studio 2015\Projects\ and type runtests.cmd , it should trigger all your Feature files directly.

Answer 4

With MSTest v2, you can´t use mstest. You can use vstest.console.exe instead.

Example:

vstest.console.exe "Automation.SpecFlow\bin\Release\Automation.SpecFlow.dll"

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/test/vstest-console-options?view=vs-2019

If you want to run all scenarios in a single feature file, then add the /trait flag:

vstest.console.exe "Automation.SpecFlow\bin\Release\Automation.SpecFlow.dll" /trait:"My Feature"

And this runs all scenarios in the feature files that begin with:

Feature: My Feature
    In order to ...
    As a ...
    I want to ...

Scenario: 1
    ...

Scenario: 2
    ...

Answer 5

I tried the tags technique but it didn't work, I'm using an older version of SpecFlow. So, I went to the .feature.cs file related to a feature file and searched for TestMethodAttribute()

[Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestMethodAttribute()]

I added the TestCategory attribute on top of this, just like the following:

[Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting.TestCategory("MyCat")]

Build and compile and the command worked like a charm with

/Category:MyCat 

I hope someone will find the answer useful.