This is a report from a team at a leading financial company:

Our project team was formed to deliver a business critical function with a fixed delivery date. Many of the team members were new to line of business that we were asked to support. Early in the project, Acceptance Test-Driven Development, and more specifically Cucumber, was a useful tool for capturing and documenting the expectations of the system. The business team was able to communicate requirements in familiar terms, even if Gherkin was a new syntax. The IT team was able to understand table-driven examples, while learning the business terminology. The two collaborating sides of our project were never completely out of their comfort zones.

Having an automated test suite based on Cucumber gives both our IT team and business team the confidence to release our software to our production environment more frequently than other project teams and without long, manual regression test cycles typical of a company of our size. Our project team knows immediately when a software change unintentionally impacts another part of the system because our automated test suite is integrated into our continuous build environment. This point was clearly on display during a Sprint Review meeting with senior leadership when a series of tests failed during a demo of our application, caused by a pre-demo check-in from a project team member. In turn, we modified the demo to show the failing tests, and how the software would be corrected to prevent defects from leaking into our production baseline.

It’s worth calling out one specific example of a Cucumber success story for our project. An entire software release was saved because we were able debug a troublesome piece of business logic through the creation of a comprehensive, production-like integration test using Cucumber. In this case, we had a series of JUnit tests that were passing, but an integration scenario was failing. The JUnit tests were not comprehensive enough with their use of mock objects and data to uncover a hidden bug in the logic. Through the creation and debug of a real world example using Cucumber, we were able to find the flaw in our logic, correct the software defect, and elevate on schedule.