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FAQ
Note: Don't forget to check out the SpecFlow FAQ as well.
Information on our privacy policy and the information we collect from customers can be found here.
See the announcement of the SpecFlow Account here
Signing up for a free SpecFlow account allows you to use the previously paid SpecFlow+ (Runner and LivingDoc) and SpecMap products for free. You no longer need to wait for us to process your request for a license manually and can expand your use of the software to more users as required. We also plan to offer exclusive additional benefits to help you boost your productivity and get the most out of SpecFlow.
To license SpecFlow+ and SpecMap with the new license model:
A free Microsoft account is required. This can be your already existing personal or corporate/enterprise Microsoft Account. If you do not yet have a Microsoft account, you can create one for free. Access to the internet is needed from your work environment. If you are working in an offline environment, please get in touch with us at support@specflow.org for information on how to license your software without an internet connection. If you previously purchased a license from TechTalk, the terms and conditions and privacy policy have changed following the acquisition of SpecFlow and SpecMap by Tricentis.
Currently, our sign up process depends technically on a Microsoft account. We need it to identify you as a valid user, so we can enable our products for you.
We support personal and corporate/enterprise Microsoft Accounts
The first time you use one of our products, you will be asked to sign in with your Microsoft Identity and set up your SpecFlow account. Once you have set up your free SpecFlow account, you can use it to sign in to SpecMap and all SpecFlow+ products. Learn more about the sign up here
If you still have a valid license key for one of our products you don't need to do anything. Therefore, you don't need to sign in with Microsoft and create a SpecFlow account. If you don't have a valid license key and can't see the Sign-in button, please make sure that you have the latest versions of our product installed.
It might be possible, that your Active Directory admin needs to grant you and your team permission to use one of our products due to your organizations' Active Directory configuration. You need to ask for permission within the dedicated form or ask your Active Directory admin to grant you and your team permission to use the product. Learn more about admin consents here.
The SpecFlow account integration is only supported in SpecFlow+ Runner versions grater than v3.2.13. You need to upgrade your SpecRun.Runner nuget package and run again your tests to see the activation URL.
If you are working in an offline environment, please contact us at support@specflow.org. You will receive information on how to license your software without an internet connection. We intend to provide an offline licensing method in the future to cater to this need.
We got acquired by Tricentis and are therefore able to offer the previously paid SpecFlow+ (Runner and LivingDoc) and SpecMap products for free. Learn more about the acquisition here
SpecFlow+ and SpecMap will be free forever.
No, you don't need to do anything right now. Only once the license keys expire each of your team members will be asked to create a free personal SpecFlow account.
If you would like to delete your SpecFlow account, please contact us at support@specflow.org. Note that deleting your account will prevent you from using any of the licensed products (SpecFlow+ Runner, SpecFlow+ LivingDoc, SpecMap). Deleting your account will not affect any data stored locally in Azure DevOps.
Even after your account is deleted, you will still see the SpecFlow+ LivingDoc and SpecMap entries in Azure DevOps. To remove these entries, you need to uninstall the extensions. This will also remove any data specific to the extension (i.e. your maps in SpecMap and your living documentation in SpecFlow+ LivingDoc).
We want to make the transition to the SpecFlow account as easy as possible. If you have any further questions or concerns, please contact us at (support@specflow.org).
SpecFlow+ is licensed per user. You only need a free SpecFlow account to use it.
Everybody with access to the project can access Living Doc.
SpecFlow+ Runner offers a number of features that go beyond those found in other test runners. A comparison of the advantages of SpecFlow+ over SpecFlow can be found here.
Some of the key features of SpecFlow+ Runner are:
- Support for multiple targets, allowing you to write a single test to target different environments (e.g. x86 and x64, various browsers).
- Configuration file transformations, which can also be used in conjunction with targets. This allows you to transform your configuration file for different platforms or web browsers, or set up a separate database instance for each thread using placeholders.
- Advanced reporting options using CSHTML templates. You can configure the output to meet your specific needs, both by customising the formatting and determining which data to include and how it should be laid out. 3 default templates are included to get you started that output your test reports as either HTML, JSON or XML.
- Adaptive test scheduling mode prioritises previously failing tests over stable tests based on your execution history. Note that this feature requires you to set up a SpecFlow+ Runner server.
- Parallelisation and isolation options for multi-threaded test execution. You can isolate threads by AppDomain, SharedAppDomain or Process.
We do not currently have a schedule for .NET Core support for SpecFlow+ Excel. There are a few factors at play:
- The acquisition of SpecFlow by Tricentis means that we currently have a lot of organizational challenges that need to be tackled, like getting new equipment, going through various training programmes etc. These overheads also include a new licensing platform, which is currently the primary development focus of the team. It is not clear exactly how long the transition phase is going to last. We expect a few months of organizational overheads to deal with before things start calming down.
- We are not sure how much demand there is for SpecFlow+ Excel, and whether the demand justifies the effort right now. This ties in with the above of there being more pressing issues at hand right now.
- We are discussing the idea of having a solution that is more flexible than just Excel sheets, such as adding support for CSV, for example, and making the solution applicable to other Cucumber implementations as well. If this is the path we want to take, it will probably mean gutting the old solution for parts and essentially creating a new one that is more flexible based on what we learnt from SpecFlow+ Excel.
So there are active discussions concerning the future of SpecFlow+ Excel, and there is a belief that there is a benefit to the solution, the biggest issue right now is justifying the time investment. It took a long time to migrate SpecFlow+ Runner to .NET Core, as the changes were not trivial. This means that there would need to be a certain level of long-term commitment, and that will require us to have more resources available than we currently do given all the other organizational changes underway.
We appreciate that this is not really an answer, but hope you can understand that this is not due to a lack of belief in the project, but due to other constrains. The more people who express interest in SpecFlow+ Excel, the easier it will be to justify the development effort required.
So if you are interested in using SpecFlow+ Excel with SpecFlow 3, please send us an email.
I am having trouble upgrading from SpecFlow+ 1.3 (or earlier) to a newer version with SpecFlow 2 support
Make sure you follow the steps out lined in the guide on updating to SpecFlow 2.
In particular:
- Make sure you restart Visual Studio as described in the link! You need to do this to flush Visual Studio's cache and ensure the correct version of SpecFlow+ is loaded.
I have multiple solutions with different versions of SpecFlow+ installed and am observing weird behaviour when switching between solutions. Why?
When loading a solution containing SpecFlow+, Visual Studio caches the SpecFlow+ components. If you open a new solution containing a SpecFlow+ project, Visual Studio will retain the cached version of the SpecFlow+ components in memory. If the version used by the two projects is different, this means that there will be a version mismatch.
You can avoid this issue by either upgrading all your solutions to the same version of SpecFlow+, or by restarting Visual Studio to flush the cache before opening the new solution.
If you have a general issue, suggestion or question concerning SpecFlow+, the best place to turn is the SpecRun Google group. The advantage to the Google group is that it is publicly available, which means that any answers can be searched for in the future. It also gives other users the opportunity to contribute to discussions.
You can also contact support directly at support [at] specflow.org. This is the best place to turn if you have licensing questions or if your problem involves sensitive information or proprietary code you do not want to be made public.
Issues with the open source SpecFlow project are managed on the GitHub tracker. There is also a Google group for the open source project, with support provided by the community. This is a good place to ask general questions you may have about SpecFlow.
Support does not extend to training (this includes answering conceptual questions, e.g. about BDD, Gherkin etc.), consulting or custom development/customisation. We can offer these services separately if you are interested.
If you have found a bug, please contact us directly at support [at] specflow.org or via the SpecRun Google group. Please include as much information as possible as you can, including:
- Your SpecFlow version
- Your SpecFlow+ version
- Which SpecFlow+ components you are using
- The test runner and version number you are using, as well as information on how you are executing the tests (e.g. include your command line)
- Your Visual Studio version
- Your .NET framework version
- A link to a project that reproduces the issue, if possible
- The SpecFlow section of your app.config file
- Your .srprofile file
How are bugs prioritised? We will investigate error reports and try and find a fix according to the severity of the issue:
- Critical: The issue prevents you from working (e.g. cannot run tests at all)
- High: The issue seriously impacts your ability to work efficiently; the issue requires a cumbersome workaround or certain key features are not working at all.
- Medium: The issue has an impact on efficiency or requires a workaround; this includes bugs that do not seriously impact your ability to complete your daily work.
- Low: The impact on efficiency is low or a feasible workaround exists. You can continue working, albeit with a minor impact.
- Cannot be reproduced: We cannot reproduce an error. We will inform you if this is the case.
If we can reproduce the error and cannot provide a quick fix, we will handle the issue according to its severity. We will also reply to you to keep you up to date on developments.
- In the case of critical errors, we will try to provide a pre-release version with a fix as soon as possible so that you do not have to wait for the next official release.
- High severity errors will either be fixed in the next official release (depending on the release schedule) or in a pre-release version.
- Medium severity errors will generally be fixed in the next official release, unless doing so would hold back a scheduled release due to the effort required.
- Low severity errors will be fixed as necessary, also taking into account the effort required for the fix (low effort fixes are prioritised).
- If we cannot reproduce an issue, we will inform you of this, asking for more information and/or suggesting other possible causes. This classification may change if suitable workarounds are discovered or you discover additional impacts on your part. Note that due to external dependencies (e.g. the Gherkin parser), there may be some cases where we are reliant on a fix that is outside of our control. In these cases we will do our best to expedite matters.
Yes!