What Do Engineers and Vegetarians Have in Common?

What do engineers and vegetarians have in common? Their love of Cucumber!

For the uninitiated, Cucumber is a test-driven development (TDD) framework that had a moment of popularity over 10 years ago when Ruby on Rails was getting traction. It was a testing framework that allowed you to write your features/tests in natural language.

It used a syntax called Gherkin. Tests are written in a structured format:

• Given → Sets up the initial context (preconditions).
• When → Specifies the action or event that triggers the scenario.
• Then → Describes the expected outcome or result.

One of the main reasons my due diligence was so easy when I sold my first company was my use of it. When the acquiring tech team wanted me to explain/show my work, their team just keyed in `cucumber` and saw a wave of green dots as selenium instances fired up on one side, while the terminal described what the application did.

It had its moment but lost popularity–the main gripe was that it was seen as an extra layer to code and maintain. Engineers didn’t see the value, and they were the ones writing the tests.

Fast forward 20 years, and enter this new world of software development, where LLMs are getting smarter by the day. I think that Cucumber should have its revival! Also, Matt Wayne, the original library author, and SmartBear, stewarding the product, recently announced that Cucumber is now back in Open Source! [Cucumber Open Source Project]

Imagine a world where a Project Manager could:

• Add a ticket/case for each logical, testable case that includes the test written in Gherkin.
• Then, an LLM can create branches picking off each of the tickets. Add the test to the repos, and work and iterate on the test /functionality until it and the other tests turn green.
• Then push up a pull request for review, the team reviews it (real human reviewers and AI reviewers).
• Upon acceptance, the team merges the file and so on…

I haven’t wired this up yet – but I am excited to try. Has anyone recently set something up like this yet?

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