Scenario Outline iteration and @Before/@After hook lifecycle

Guaranteed Hook Order for Scenario Outline Rows

In Cucumber‑JVM the parser expands a Scenario Outline into one scenario instance per row in the Examples table. Each instance is reported separately and is treated as a normal scenario for the purposes of hook execution.

Hook Lifecycle per Instance

• Before hooks – All hooks annotated with @Before that match the scenario’s tags are executed in the order they appear in the code (or in the numeric @order if supplied).
• Scenario steps – The steps of the scenario outline are executed with the current row’s example values substituted.
• After hooks – All matching @After hooks run in reverse declaration order.

Tag filtering is evaluated for each instance, so a hook that applies to @smoke will run only for rows whose example row tags include @smoke.

Runner‑Independent Guarantee

Whether the test is launched via JUnit (4, 5) or TestNG, the per‑instance hook sequence is identical. The only difference is that class‑level runner hooks (@BeforeAll, @AfterAll, @BeforeClass, @AfterClass) execute once per test class, not per example row.

Practical Verification Example

Feature: Login
  @smoke
  Scenario Outline: Successful login
    Given I open the login page
    When I login as <user> with <password>
    Then I should see <welcome>

    Examples:
      | user | password | welcome |
      | alice | secret1 | Alice's Dashboard |
      | bob   | secret2 | Bob's Dashboard |

public class Hooks {
  @Before(order = 1)
  public void beforeScenario(Scenario scenario) {
    System.out.println("Before: " + scenario.getName());
  }

  @After(order = 1)
  public void afterScenario(Scenario scenario) {
    System.out.println("After: " + scenario.getName());
  }
}

Running this feature with either runner will print:

Before: Successful login (alice)
After: Successful login (alice)
Before: Successful login (bob)
After: Successful login (bob)

Key Takeaway

Yes – Cucumber‑JVM guarantees a clean state for each Examples row by invoking the full @Before / @After lifecycle for every row, regardless of the underlying test runner. The only hooks that are not repeated per row are the class‑level lifecycle hooks provided by the runner itself.

Diagnostic Question

If you observe that hooks are not run per row, confirm that you are using a modern Cucumber‑JVM version (≥ 7). Older releases had different integration behavior.