Acceleration

Normally, FitNesse runs tests one-by-one. That is, under normal circumstances, each Cuke table will result in its own standalone execution of cucumber. This means that when you run a suite of tests, Cucumber will be running multiple times (once per feature) when it should really be running all features at once.

This may be fine if your test environment is simple, and Cucumber runs quickly. But if your application has a lot of dependencies to load, there may be too much overhead to run a suite of tests in this way.

Cukable provides a workaround to this in the form of something called AaaAccelerator. If you have a suite of three features:

• MyFeatures (suite)
  • FirstFeature (test)
  • SecondFeature (test)
  • ThirdFeature (test)

and you want to be able to run the entire suite without invoking a separate Cucumber instance each time, simply create a new child page of MyFeatures called AaaAccelerator (named this way so it will be executed first in the suite):

• MyFeatures (suite)
  • AaaAccelerator (test)
  • FirstFeature (test)
  • SecondFeature (test)
  • ThirdFeature (test)

The AaaAccelerator page does not need to have any content; you can leave it empty if you like. Its existence alone will cause acceleration to take effect for the suite that it's in. To make this magic happen, you must add this to your SetUp page for the suite:

| script | Cuke |
| accelerate; | ${PAGE_PATH}.${PAGE_NAME} | ${CUCUMBER_ARGS} |

Include this exactly as it appears; the variables will be expanded to the name of your AaaAccelerator page when the suite runs. The CUCUMBER_ARGS piece is an optional argument that passes any defined command-line arguments to Cucumber (see below).

You can nest suites inside each other, and each suite can have its own AaaAccelerator page. Whenever you execute a suite, the highest-level accelerator will be executed (thus running as many features as possible together).

Next: Cucumber Arguments