Future of REQNROLL & Migrating from SpecFlow

[fawadABhatti]

reqnroll is based on the SpecFlow framework, but with SpecFlow becoming redundant, what does the future look like for reqnroll ? Will it continue to evolve independently, and what advantages does it offer over SpecFlow moving forward?

Additionally, for teams currently using SpecFlow, how easy is the migration process to reqnroll? Are there any tools, guides, or best practices that can simplify the transition? Would love to hear from those who have already made the switch!

Looking forward to insights and experiences from the community.

[gasparnagy]

Reqnroll is based on the SpecFlow framework, but with SpecFlow becoming redundant, what does the future look like for reqnroll?

Reqnroll has gained a big enough user base already so there is no sign that the future existence of the project is questioned.

Will it continue to evolve independently

Since the fork beginning of 2024 we develop independently of SpecFlow or Tricentis and this will continue like that. We cooperate closely with the Cucumber open-source community.

[...] and what advantages does it offer over SpecFlow moving forward?

The most obvious advantage is that it runs on modern .NET platforms and receives regular updates for fixing issues and addressing security problems.

I think there are already a few useful feature improvement, like support for scenario-level parallel execution, native async support or being able to navigate to hooks in Visual Studio. But we work on other improvements as well, like being able to provide cucumber messages reports (needed for reporting), improved dependency injection support or using the benefits of Roslyn source generators and analyzers.

But when we talk about the future, probably the first thing we should highlight that Reqnroll is a community-driven open-source project. That means that we don't have a big company behind who would pay our bills (or shut down the project without notice). So the future depends on all of us. Some can allocate time to fix a bug (an average bugfix takes 2-4h of intensive free work), some help the others by answering support issues or enhance the documentation.

📢I encourage everyone to invite the contributors for a coffee🍵, for example. That we could use to pay our hosting bills or finally have gathering to make an in-person design workshop to better align our goals. (And drink those coffees, of course. Maybe a beer 🍺too...) https://github.com/sponsors/reqnroll.

I hope others will post more about their upgrade experience too.

[304NotModified]

The upgrade was pretty easy with a medium sized project (10K lines). The most difficult part for us was the change in the MS dependency injection plugin. All other SpecFlow 3 to Reqnroll 2 was very easy.