Conventions to write BDD Story files in JBehave

Writing BDD Stories in Gherkin is easy, but Conventions would help us scale -up and manage them much more effectively.

• Do not create too many feature files for each Jira story/task that you have, instead create feature files based on the functional aspects or features of your application. This will prevent proliferation of too many scenarios spread across too many story files.
• Define a unique parent tag for each feature file that you create. This will be used to run all the scenarios in this story file. Define the parent Meta Tag as per the following format - @PROJECTNAME_FEATURENAME
• Define a unique scenario-level Meta Tag as per the following format - @COMPONENT_FEATURE_TC<scenario-num> This will be used to run only the selected test-scenario from that story.
• Along with the Feature, we may also want to add a tag, for the Jira Story, if needed, like @JIRA_<jiraID>. This can come handy when we only want to run tests based on each Jira Story or Epic
• Define a common tag for different Category of tests, like @REGRESSION, @SMOKE, @API, etc. This will help run all the regression or smoke tests across different story files.
• Meta tags can be defined in upper or lower case, but upper case is preferred
• Do NOT use '-' in any of the meta tags. Using '-' in a tag name will actually not execute that test scenario
• Do NOT have spaces in between in any tag's name, use '_' instead
• Now, all my tests are not automated, and they wont run but they sure should be in the story files. So have additional tags for tests that are not automated, are still work in progress, or you just dont want to run, like below. [All these tags would be used to skip the tests]
• @SKIP - denotes that these tests should be skipped and not run at all when running the JBehave Stories.
• @MANUAL - denotes that the tests will not be automated, and have to be executed manually.
• @WIP - denotes that these tests are not ready to be run in an automated manner
• One of the reasons to include manual tests in the stories as well is to ensure that we have just one place to maintain all our tests, and its easier to report status.

Refer this post to put these conventions to use - How to use Meta Filters in JBehave

Add Meta Filters for JBehave Story

Meta filters in JBehave are very useful when we want to run only small subset of test scenarios across multiple Story files. 

For instance when there are 100 tests spread across 5 different Story files and we want to run just 20 tests (4 tests from each of the 5 stories). If we have Meta-tags defined, we just have to specify the tags for the tests we want to run or skip.

To enable filtering via Meta tags in JBehave, just add the following 3 lines in your Stories.java class, under the Stories() Constructor.

public Stories() {

  configuredEmbedder().embedderControls()
  .doGenerateViewAfterStories(true)
  .doIgnoreFailureInStories(true)
  .doIgnoreFailureInView(true)
  .useThreads(2)
  .useStoryTimeoutInSecs(300);

      //Custom Config >> Added to enable Meta tag based filtering
        List<String> metaFilters = new ArrayList<String>();
        metaFilters.add(System.getProperty("metaFilters", "-skip"));
        configuredEmbedder().useMetaFilters(metaFilters);

    }

@SKIP - this is the meta tag that can now be added to any test to skip its execution.

Refer this post to run JBehave stories by specifying Meta filters via Maven