Execute SpecFlow specs (.feature files) without compilation

Question

I want to be able to execute given SpecFlow (Gherkin) .feature file locally without doing compilation.

So workflow would be (as a Business Analyst or a QA engineer):
1. modify .feature file (using predefined vocabulary of steps)
2. run

SpecFlowSuperTool.exe
    /feature:.\FoobarprojectSpecs.feature
    /assembly:Foobarproject.dll,Foobarproject.Core.dll

3. get a report

Goal is to be able to execute feature on-demand without having to recompile the code if only features have changed.

It feels like it should be a pretty straight-forward task to implement such a tool since Gherkin steps binding happens at run-time (judging by the NUnit code generated by SpecFlow).

I do understand that generate->compile->run scenario is supported already, but compile step seems unnecessary in some cases.

UPDATE I ended up coding the tool myself. SpecFlow API is very simple, it was pretty easy to build a specflowrunner.exe that would take a directory or a file + configuration file, and execute .feature files directly, without creating a unit tests first.

Answer 1

You're talking about SpecFlow.exe ;)

Actually there's a few steps involved and I blogged about it using MsTest about a year ago.

The basic steps are:

1. Use SpecFlow.exe (with switch generateall) to generate tests from the .feature files.
2. Run tests and create a report. In my example i'm using MsTest but NUnit will work just fine.
3. Use SpecFlow.exe again (with switch mstestexecutionreport in my case) to generate the report.

You are more than welcome to use my batfiles if you want

Good luck