When Cucumber Grows Too Big: Pain Points, Lessons Learned, and Alternatives (opens in new tab)

What Is Cucumber, and Why Do Teams Love It? If you have spent any time in behavior-driven development (BDD), you have almost certainly encountered Cucumber. First released in 2008, it has become the de facto standard for writing executable specifications in plain language. The core idea is elegant: tests are written in Gherkin, a structured natural language format built around three keywords — Given, When, and Then. A product owner, a tester, and a developer can all read the same file and agr...