How To Stop Cucumber Ruby

Cucumber Ruby is a powerful tool for testing your Ruby applications using Behavior Driven Development (BDD) methodology. However, there may be times when you
need to stop the execution of your Cucumber tests intentionally. In this blog post, we will discuss how to stop Cucumber Ruby during test execution and ensure that your
application behaves correctly.

Stopping Cucumber Ruby using Tags

One of the easiest ways to stop Cucumber Ruby is by using tags. A tag is a label that can be assigned to a feature or a scenario in your Cucumber
tests. When you run your tests with specific tags, Cucumber will execute only the scenarios that are marked with those tags.

Let’s say you have a scenario that is causing problems in your test suite, and you want to temporarily exclude it from the test run. You can add a custom tag, such as
@wip (Work In Progress), to the problematic scenario.

        @wip
        Scenario: Problematic Scenario
          Given ...
          When ...
          Then ...
    

Now, when you run your Cucumber tests, you can use the –tags option followed by the ~@wip argument to exclude scenarios marked with the @wip tag:

        cucumber --tags ~@wip
    

With this command, Cucumber will execute all the scenarios without the @wip tag, effectively stopping the problematic scenario from running.

Stopping Cucumber Ruby using Hooks

Another way to stop Cucumber Ruby is by using hooks. Hooks are blocks of code that can be executed at various points in the test execution lifecycle. You can use
hooks to stop a test run based on specific conditions, such as a failed assertion or the maximum number of allowed failures.

For example, you can create a global variable to count the number of failed scenarios and use an After hook to stop the test run if the count reaches a certain limit. First, add
a global variable at the top of your support/env.rb file:

        $failed_scenarios_count = 0
    

Next, create an After hook in the same file to increment the failed scenarios count and stop the test run using the at_exit method if the count reaches the limit:

        After do |scenario|
          if scenario.failed?
            $failed_scenarios_count += 1
            if $failed_scenarios_count >= 3
              puts "Test run aborted after 3 failed scenarios."
              at_exit { exit(1) }
            end
          end
        end
    

In this example, the test run will be stopped after three failed scenarios. You can adjust the limit as needed to fit your testing requirements.

Conclusion

Stopping the execution of Cucumber Ruby tests can be necessary in situations where you need to focus on specific features, scenarios, or when you have encountered a certain number of
failures. Using tags and hooks, you can easily control the test execution flow and ensure that your application behaves as expected. Remember to remove or adjust these
configurations once the necessary fixes have been applied to prevent any unintentional side effects during future test runs.