FailingUponPendingSteps strategy not honoured

I tracked down the problem and it resides in jbehave-core/src/main/java/org/jbehave/core/embedder/StoryManager.java:

    public void waitUntilAllDoneOrFailed(BatchFailures failures) {
        boolean allDone = false;
        while (!allDone) {
            allDone = true;
            for (RunningStory runningStory : runningStories.values()) {                 
                if ( runningStory.isStarted() ){
                    Story story = runningStory.getStory();
                                        Future<ThrowableStory> future = runningStory.getFuture();
                                        if (!future.isDone()) {
                                                allDone = false;

In the above code, the if ( runningStory.isStarted() ){ does not have any else, so if the stories have not yet started, allDone is left true and JBehave exits without waiting for the stories to finish running.

Can you please provide an example of running stories not being started?

The assumption is that at least one story has started. Otherwise, we can add a wait for at least one to start.

I ran the following story without any Steps implementation:

Feature: Login

Narrative:
In order to use the system, one needs to login and identify herself
to the system

Scenario:  Login page
When user browses to http://localhost:1090/
Then the login page appears

I had configured the runner to complain about the non-existing implementations:

embedder.configuration().usePendingStepStrategy(new FailingUponPendingStep());

Expected behaviour: build should fail with that configuration
Actual behaviour: it always succeeded
JBehave version: jbehave-ant 3.9.4

More details:
I did not get any failures, so I started debugging JBehave. When tracing, sometimes I got the error, so I guessed it was a timing issue. Debugging more and I came into the place I pasted above. Then I used the 3.9.3 version and the build always failed with that version, as expected.

Added examples/core/src/main/java/org/jbehave/examples/core/CoreStoriesFailingUponPending.java to verify behaviour.