Feature Start and End

In an ideal world, all scenario should start from a clean slate with no previous set up performed.

This is desirable to ensure there are no preconditions or ordering effects which can lead to the success and failure of any scenario.

Often, where each scenario shares some set up steps, these steps are put into a Background: section. The background section runs for every scenario.

However, there are often reasons why you might want to perform background steps just once per feature.

For example:

• The set up steps are especially expensive to perform
• The set up steps sometimes fail - when this happens there is no point repeating that failure for all the scenarios in the feature

To cater for this, Chorus adds two special sections to the Gherkin language.

Feature-Start: and Feature-End:

These sections act like specialised scenarios, with the following important differences:

1. Feature-Start: section must appear before any other scenarios in the feature file
2. Feature-End: section must appear after all other scenarios.
3. Feature-Start: and Feature-End: cannot be tagged. This means they will always get run if any other scenarios from the feature pass the tag rules.
4. If Feature-Start: fails, no other scenarios from the feature will run, apart from Feature-End:
5. Background: steps in the feature will not be included for the Feature-Start: and Feature-End:

This is how it looks:

Feature: Feature With Start And End

Feature-Start:
    First I perform a slow running startup step
    
Scenario: Scenario One
    Given I make a change A 
    Then I check a post condition A
    
Scenario: Scenario Two
    Given I make a change B
    Then I check a post condition B
    
Feature-End:
    Finally I perform a cleanup step