serenity-core | Serenity BDD is a test automation library | Runtime Evironment library

Your test class is not starting Spring, that is why you get null. Have a look here https://www.baeldung.com/cucumber-spring-integration, it shows how to connect Spring and Cucumber in JUnit tests.

The test class would then have annotations for Spring and Cucumber like this:

This happens when classes aren't available at runtime.

You are using custom sourcesets i.e. applicationTest which is not configured properly to run cucumber task.

One solution is to change your class path in cucumber task and include the main source sets to use applicationTest classes

1. cucumber task

Able to figure out the reason why the command was not working. in pom.xml file, after adding tags and while running the command by giving the report output path, I am able to get the Serenity reports as expected.

updates done:

You're using the wrong value for parallel. You have to set it to methods or both. Otherwise Surefire will run all tests of your runner class serially.

https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm/tree/master/junit

Cucumber JUnit supports parallel execution of feature files across multiple threads. To enable this with maven set the parallel property to either methods or both.

Eventually I discovered that I had first to setup the Failsafe plugin, and then make it communicate with the CucumberMain class. Then, from the CLI, executing either mvn verify or mvn test with the list of tests that I want to execute made the trick