Preface

Cucumber is a friendly tool. It wants to be part of your team, and it doesn’t mind being the nitpicky nerd who can remember every single little detail about what your system can and can’t do. Every team needs someone like that.

Even better than that, Cucumber will volunteer to do all the boring repetitive checks that you need to run to make sure that the system is working as expected. This frees your testers up to do interesting, creative work instead, and it gives programmers the courage to perform major surgery to the code when it’s required. Business stakeholders warm to Cucumber’s open attitude, sharing everything that the development team is doing in terminology that they can actually understand.

Cucumber is a young tool, but it’s already become clear that some people misunderstand it. Those of us who were drawn to Cucumber from the beginning instinctively realized that it’s more than a testing tool; it’s a collaboration tool. By writing this book, we hope to show you not just how to use Cucumber but how to use it well.