As you might have heard, Tricentis has announced the end-of-life of the SpecFlow open source project. According to the announcement, SpecFlow has reached its end-of-life on December 31, 2024. As of 1st of January the SpecFlow GitHub projects have been deleted and the support section of the specflow.org website are disabled.
Multiple SpecSync users have asked if this has any impact on SpecSync.
Despite the similar sounding name, SpecSync (by Spec Solutions) is a fully independent product from SpecFlow, and although you can use it to synchronize scenarios automated with SpecFlow, you can synchronize many other test sources as well, like Cucumber, C# and Java coded tests, Postman test or even tests described in Excel files.
As SpecSync processes the SpecFlow feature files and does not run SpecFlow itself, the end-of-life announcement does not affect SpecSync, you will be able to synchronize SpecFlow scenarios or other test sources like before.
Use Reqnroll with SpecSync
Seeing at the beginning of 2024 that the SpecFlow project seemed to be abandoned, I “forked” the project and rebooted it under a new name: Reqnroll. (“Forking” is a term used in open-source projects to make a copy of the open-source codebase.) The new name was necessary as the “SpecFlow” name was trademarked by Tricentis.
By now, Reqnroll is an actively developed open-source project with an active contributor and user base. It has been updated to support .NET 8.0 and .NET 9.0 and we keep adding further improvements. More than 5000 projects have been using Reqnroll by the beginning of 2025, including some bigger projects with more than 1000 feature files, so we can say that Reqnroll is a mature replacement option for SpecFlow projects.
The good news is that you can also use SpecSync to synchronize Reqnroll projects, just like you did with SpecFlow. Please make sure you use SpecSync v3.4.20 or later.
Support for SpecFlow migration
While SpecSync will work with SpecFlow scenarios, you will probably consider migrating your SpecFlow projects to Reqnroll.
As I am involved both in SpecSync and SpecFlow/Reqnroll, I can offer you help with SpecFlow migration as well. You can use this as part of your existing SpecSync support contract.
I am happy to assist you with finding the best migration strategy for your projects and give support for the migration process. Please contact to make an online appointment for discussing the details.
Next SpecSync version comes soon!
Although it is not publicly available yet, we are working hard on finalizing the next major SpecSync version. As part of this release, we will change our versioning scheme to support semantic versioning, so the next version will be labelled as SpecSync v5!
The most important new features, like the support for synchronizing Test Suite hierarchies and the improved possibilities to track deleted scenarios (called “remote scope”) are already in the exploratory testing phase and I’m very excited to share them though the first public preview version soon.
The new version will come with an “upgrade wizard”, that will help you to apply the configuration changes and to setup the new features, like the hierarchies.
Happy synching! Please stay tuned.