Question

I’ve understood that blue dashes in features output means the step was skipped because something before it failed but in all of my scenario outlines I get blue dashes but also a line that says all passed.

Here is my Scenario Outline.

Scenario Outline: Attempt to assign a role when not authorized
  Given a <user_who_can_not_assign_roles> exists with email: "[e-mail]"
  And that user is signed in
  And I am on the user's show page
  And a role exists with name: "<other_role1>"
  And a role exists with name: "<other_role2>"
  When I follow "Edit"
  Then I should not see "Admin"
  And I should not see "Manager"
  And I should not see "Salesperson"
  When I fill in "username" with "spuds"
  And I fill in "password" with "potatoes"
  And I fill in "password confirmation" with "potatoes"
  And I fill in "email" with "[e-mail]"
  And I press "Save"
  Then I should see "success"
  And a role should exist with name: "<other_role1>"
  And that role should not be one of the user's roles
  And a role should exist with name: "<other_role2>"
  And that role should not be one of the user's roles

  Examples:
    | user_who_can_not_assign_roles | other_role1 | other_role2 |
    | manager                       | Admin       | Salesperson |
    | salesperson                   | Admin       | Manager     |

When I run this feature I get this output.

——————-……

2 scenarios (2 passed)
38 steps (38 passed)
0m3.300s

I get that its 2 scenarios because I have 2 examples listed and 38 steps would be the 19 run twice. What I don’t understand is why it shows the blue dashes (like it normally shows for skipped steps) when it also says 38 steps passed.

I would assume that this is intended when running outlines because if I change on of the steps marked with a blue dash it will show failed. I was just looking for some confirmation in the cucumber docs and I can’t find anything.

I’m running rails 3.0.0, cucumber 0.9.3, and pickle 0.4.2.

Answer 1

The blue dashes in this case represent the parsing of the scenario outline, which is more metadata than test. I find it confusing as well. To get a better idea of what is going on, try executing:

cucumber -f pretty <your_fancy_scenario.feature>

This will force cucumber to display the actual scenario text with the color coding, instead of just the dots and dashes.

Hope that helps!