The Cucumber Book

How Cucumber Works

Before we dive into the meat of the book, let’s give you some context with a high-level overview of a typical Cucumber test suite.

Cucumber is a command-line tool. When you run it, it reads in your specifications from plain-language text files called features, examines them for scenarios to test, and runs the scenarios against your system. Each scenario is a list of steps for Cucumber to work through. So that Cucumber can understand these feature files, they must follow some basic syntax rules. The name for this set of rules is Gherkin.

Along with the features, you give Cucumber a set of step definitions, which map the business-readable language of each step into Ruby code to carry out whatever action is being described ...