How To Use Soft Assert In TestNG | TestNG Tutorial

Before knowing what is Soft Assert, first let’s see what is an Assert and what is the disadvantage in using Assert and why we are moving to Soft Assert.

Must Read: Difference between Assert & Verify in Selenium

Asserts are used to perform validations in the test scripts.

There are two types of Assert:

1. Hard Assert
2. Soft Assert

When an assert fails the test script stops execution unless handled in some form. We call general assert as Hard Assert

Hard Assert – Hard Assert throws an AssertException immediately when an assert statement fails and test suite continues with next @Test

The disadvantage of Hard Assert – It marks method as fail if assert condition gets failed and the remaining statements inside the method will be aborted.

To overcome this we need to use Soft Assert. Let’s see what is Soft Assert.

Soft Assert – Soft Assert collects errors during @Test. Soft Assert does not throw an exception when an assert fails and would continue with the next step after the assert statement.

If there is any exception and you want to throw it then you need to use assertAll() method as a last statement in the @Test and test suite again continue with next @Test as it is.

We need to create an object to use Soft Assert which is not needed in Hard Assert.

Check below video to see “Soft Assert in TestNG”

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Let’s see a practical example:

Here I took two methods namely softAssert() and hardAssert().

In the softAssert() method, I have used SoftAssert class and intentionally passing value false in the assertTrue() method to make it fail

In thehardAssert() method, I simply used Assert and intentionally passing parameter value false in the assertTrue() method to make it fail

package softwareTestingMaterial;

import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;
import org.testng.asserts.SoftAssert;

public class SoftAssertion {

	@Test
	public void softAssert(){
		SoftAssert softAssertion= new SoftAssert();
		System.out.println("softAssert Method Was Started");
		softAssertion.assertTrue(false);
		System.out.println("softAssert Method Was Executed");
	}
	
	@Test
	public void hardAssert(){
		System.out.println("hardAssert Method Was Started");
		Assert.assertTrue(false);
		System.out.println("hardAssert Method Was Executed");
	}
}

Execute the above script and see the console output. You could see only one failure.

Console Output:

[TestNG] Running:
  C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Temp\testng-eclipse--2097831536\testng-customsuite.xml

hardAssert Method Was Started
softAssert Method Was Started
softAssert Method Was Executed

===============================================
Default suite
Total tests run: 2, Failures: 1, Skips: 0
===============================================

Below script is same as the first one but just added assertAll() method in the end of the first method (i.e., softAssert()).

Note:  If you forget to call assertAll() at the end of your test, the test will pass even if any assert objects threw exceptions as shown in the above example. So don’t forget to add assertAll()

package softwareTestingMaterial;

import org.testng.Assert;
import org.testng.annotations.Test;
import org.testng.asserts.SoftAssert;

public class SoftAssertion {

	@Test
	public void softAssert(){
		SoftAssert softAssertion= new SoftAssert();
		System.out.println("softAssert Method Was Started");
		softAssertion.assertTrue(false);
		System.out.println("softAssert Method Was Executed");
		softAssertion.assertAll();
	}
	
	@Test
	public void hardAssert(){
		System.out.println("hardAssert Method Was Started");
		Assert.assertTrue(false);
		System.out.println("hardAssert Method Was Executed");
	}
}

Execute the above script and see the console output. There are two failures here. Second failure is due to assertAll() method

Console Output:

[TestNG] Running:
  C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Temp\testng-eclipse--147736931\testng-customsuite.xml

hardAssert Method Was Started
softAssert Method Was Started
softAssert Method Was Executed

===============================================
Default suite
Total tests run: 2, Failures: 2, Skips: 0
===============================================

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