Training Agenda

Cucumber / Gherkin

Cucumber executes specifications written in Gherkin — plain English (or German, or French) scenarios that describe system behaviour from a business perspective. When done well, Cucumber scenarios become living documentation that business stakeholders read and developers execute. When done poorly, they become brittle test wrappers around implementation details that nobody reads and everyone hates maintaining. This training covers writing good Gherkin, structuring Cucumber step definitions, and integrating Cucumber into a Spring Boot CI pipeline.

1 day On-site, remote, or hybrid Up to 20 participants German or English
What We Cover
Executable specifications that business and dev both own
Module 1

Gherkin Writing & Scenario Design

  • Gherkin anatomy: Feature, Background, Scenario, Given/When/Then, And, But
  • Scenario quality: business-readable, implementation-independent, concrete examples
  • Scenario Outline with Examples tables: data-driven scenarios
  • Tags: @smoke, @regression, @wip — filtering test execution
  • Background: shared preconditions without repeating Given steps
  • Writing Given steps that set up state — not UI interactions
  • When steps: single user action per scenario
  • Then steps: observable outcomes, not internal assertions
  • Example Mapping workshop: discovering scenarios before writing code
  • Common mistakes: imperative vs declarative style, testing UI through Cucumber, giant step definitions
Module 2

Step Definitions & Spring Integration

  • Step definition anatomy: regex vs Cucumber expressions, parameter types
  • World object: sharing state between steps
  • Hooks: @Before, @After, @BeforeStep — setup and teardown
  • Custom parameter types: mapping Gherkin strings to domain objects
  • Cucumber with Spring: @CucumberContextConfiguration, @SpringBootTest, context caching
  • Cucumber with Testcontainers: real databases in acceptance tests
  • Page Object pattern for UI scenarios: separating navigation from assertions
  • Reporting: Cucumber HTML reports, Allure integration
  • Running Cucumber in CI: JUnit Platform integration, filtering by tag
  • Living documentation: publishing Cucumber reports for stakeholders
Learning Outcomes
What your team walks away with

Teams who write Cucumber scenarios that are genuinely readable by non-developers, maintainable by developers, and valuable as regression coverage — not just passing green checks nobody trusts.

Book the Cucumber / Gherkin training

Works best as a combined session with developers, testers, and product owners — the three-amigos format makes the most of the training.

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