xRetry

Retry flickering test cases for xUnit and SpecFlow in dotnet.

When to use this

This is intended for use on flickering tests, where the reason for failure is an external dependency and the failure is transient, e.g:

• HTTP request over the network
• Database call that could deadlock, timeout etc...

Whenever a test includes real-world infrastructure, particularly when communicated with via the internet, there is a risk of the test randomly failing so we want to try and run it again. This is the intended use case of the library.

If you have a test that covers some flaky code, where sporadic failures are caused by a bug, this library should not be used to cover it up!

Usage: SpecFlow 3

Add the xRetry.SpecFlow nuget package to your project.

Above any scenario or scenario outline that should be retried, add a @retry tag, e.g:

@retry
Scenario: Retry three times by default
	When I increment the default retry count
	Then the default result should be 3

This will retry the test up to 3 times by default. You can optionally specify a number of times to retry the test in brackets, e.g. @retry(5).

You can also optionally specify a delay between each retry (in milliseconds) as a second parameter, e.g. @retry(5,100) will run your test 5 times until it passes, waiting 100ms between each attempt.
Note that you must not include a space between the parameters, as Cucumber/SpecFlow uses a space to separate tags, i.e. @retry(5, 100) would not work due to the space after the comma.

Usage: xUnit

Add the xRetry nuget package to your project.

Facts

Above any Fact test case that should be retried, replace the Fact attribute, with RetryFact, e.g:

private static int defaultNumCalls = 0;

[RetryFact]
public void Default_Reaches3()
{
    defaultNumCalls++;

    Assert.Equal(3, defaultNumCalls);
}

This will retry the test up to 3 times by default. You can optionally specify a number of times to retry the test as an argument, e.g. [RetryFact(5)].

You can also optionally specify a delay between each retry (in milliseconds) as a second parameter, e.g. [RetryFact(5, 100)] will run your test 5 times until it passes, waiting 100ms between each attempt.

Theories

If you have used the library for retrying Fact tests, using it to retry a Theory should be very intuitive.
Above any Theory test case that should be retried, replace the Theory attribute with RetryTheory, e.g:

// testId => numCalls
private static readonly Dictionary<int, int> defaultNumCalls = new Dictionary<int, int>()
{
    { 0, 0 },
    { 1, 0 }
};

[RetryTheory]
[InlineData(0)]
[InlineData(1)]
public void Default_Reaches3(int id)
{
    defaultNumCalls[id]++;

    Assert.Equal(3, defaultNumCalls[id]);
}

The same optional arguments (max retries and delay between each retry) are supported as for facts, and can be used in the same way.

Skipping tests at Runtime

In addition to retries, RetryFact and RetryTheory both support dynamically skipping tests at runtime. To make a test skip just use Skip.Always() within your test code.
It also supports custom exception types so you can skip a test if a type of exception gets thrown. You do this by specifying the exception type to the attribute above your test, e.g.

[RetryFact(typeof(TestException))]
public void CustomException_SkipsAtRuntime()
{
    throw new TestException();
}

This functionality also allows for skipping to work when you are already using another library for dynamically skipping tests by specifying the exception type that is used by that library to the RetryFact. e.g. if you are using the popular Xunit.SkippableFact nuget package and want to add retries, converting the test is as simple as replacing [SkippableFact] with [RetryFact(typeof(Xunit.SkipException))] above the test and you don't need to change the test itself.

Viewing retry logs

By default, you won't see whether your tests are being retried as we make this information available via the xunit diagnostic logs but test runners will hide these detailed logs by default.
To enable them you must configure your xUnit test project to have diagnosticMessages set to true in the xunit.runner.json. See the xUnit docs for a full setup guide of their config file, or see this projects own unit tests which has been set up with this enabled.

Contributing

Feel free to open a pull request! If you want to start any sizeable chunk of work, consider opening an issue first to discuss, and make sure nobody else is working on the same problem.

Running locally

To run locally, always build xRetry.SpecFlowPlugin before the tests, to ensure MSBuild uses the latest version of your changes.

If you install make and go to the build directory, you can run the following from the terminal to build, run tests and create the nuget packages:

make ci

If that works, all is well!

Licence

MIT