StepEventBus.getEventBus().clearStepFailures() no longer works correctly

[nbarrett]

What happened?

• There are cases in our test infrastructure where we wish to call StepEventBus.getEventBus().clearStepFailures() and and continue with test execution flow.
• The behaviour that used to work in as originally discussed in It's not possible to catch exceptions thrown by Tasks #652 (comment) no longer works.
• This was also more recently discussed in Override Serenity Step Exception Handling? #3115.

What did you expect to happen?

I would expect that calling StepEventBus.getEventBus().clearStepFailures() would not cause the test to fail but it still does.

Serenity BDD version

4.1.6 (latest)

JDK version

8->21

Execution environment

mac/linux

How to reproduce the bug.

• See nbarrett/serenity-cucumber-starter@6cad748 for a project that reproduces problem in this issue.
• To run call mvn clean verify serenity:aggregate -Dtags=event_bus_test -f pom.xml

How can we make it happen?

Work on this myself and propose a PR (with Serenity BDD team guidance)

[wakaleo]

This won't work as expected with the new Cucumber 7 event model, as events are now cumulated and assembled at the end of the test

[nbarrett]

Actually having thought about it, the example project I supplied for 4.1.6 was slightly incorrect as the behaviour I wanted to test is whether an exception thrown within another performable can be caught and reset by a parent. When I revised my project as can be seen here, it actually works - in that subsequent steps can be continued without an overall test suite failure outcome:

• Calling StepEventBus.getEventBus().clearStepFailures() is not needed as we've caught the exception thrown by the performable in the catch block - something that was not possible in previous versions of Serenity discussed here so this is a big improvement! 👍 👍
• We are unable to clear reporting which remains amber (not a problem in my case) regardless of whether we clearStepFailures or not.

As a further check I rolled the Serenity example project back to 3.6.22 which is the version we are still on within our client project. This does reproduce the original problem that I raised which is that it's not possible to catch or reset the step failures and the first failing test case causes a test suite failure outcome:

So it looks like the solution is to upgrade to Serenity version 4.1.6 on our project. However, there are other report aggregation performance problems we're wrestling with at the moment with that, that might well be the subject of a further PR soon 🤞 - stay tuned!)