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Testing / Karate Framework Interview questions

Explain the internal working of the @lock tag for controlling parallel execution?

Some scenarios genuinely can't run safely at the same time as others, most often because they touch a shared, stateful resource like a specific database row or an external system that doesn't tolerate concurrent writes. The @lock tag provides fine-grained mutual exclusion for exactly these cases, without forcing the entire suite to give up parallelism.

flowchart TD A[Suite starts, many scenarios ready to run in parallel] --> B{Scenario tagged with @lock=X?} B -->|No| C[Runs immediately in parallel with everything else] B -->|Yes| D{Is lock X currently held?} D -->|No| E[Acquire lock X, run scenario] D -->|Yes| F[Wait until lock X is released] E --> G[Scenario completes, release lock X] F --> D

A scenario tagged @lock=database only waits for, and blocks, other scenarios sharing that same lock name; scenarios with a different lock name (or no lock at all) continue running in parallel, unaffected. This is a meaningful improvement over the older, coarser @parallel=false tag, which opted a scenario out of parallel execution entirely, serializing it against every other test in the suite even when only one specific resource was actually contended.

A scenario tagged @lock=database blocks:
@lock improves on the older @parallel=false tag by:

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