Cucumber

We use Cucumber when the people deciding what ‘correct’ means aren’t the people writing the code. Scenarios in Gherkin give a product owner or business analyst something they can read and dispute before it is built, which catches specification defects far earlier than a test run does. The discipline that makes it work is keeping step definitions thin — a step maps to one intention and delegates immediately to a page object or service layer, so the readable layer and the automation layer can change independently. Where we see Cucumber fail on inherited projects, it is almost always because steps became a scripting language and scenarios turned into click-by-click instructions nobody reads. We keep scenario counts deliberately low and reserve them for behaviour worth agreeing on in writing, running the bulk of regression coverage underneath at a lower level.