Your Appium suite is green. Then a product manager asks what it covers, and your only answer is a list of Java method names like loginShouldSucceed. The code knows what it tests. Nobody outside the code does.
BDD with Cucumber fixes that by splitting what a test verifies from how it runs. The Gherkin spec is the readable layer; your existing screen objects and assertions stay exactly where they are. No refactor.
This guide covers the integration end to end on a Java 21 + Spring + Appium framework:
One detail that trips people up: CucumberSpringConfiguration holds no test logic. It's a declarative pointer — a single annotated class telling Cucumber which Spring context to load. Skip it and your step
definitions get a null driver, because Spring never injects anything.
