You have six years of automation experience and a Cucumber suite that takes forty minutes to run, and you still can't tell me what a single feature file actually tests without reading three layers of glue code.
I've been there. You're the senior automation engineer on a team that adopted BDD because "business stakeholders need to read the tests." Except those stakeholders stopped reading them after sprint two. Now you're maintaining a suite where every scenario is a small novel, every step definition calls three other step definitions, and the person who wrote the original framework left the company eighteen months ago.
Here's what nobody tells you about BDD before your Cucumber suite becomes a maintenance nightmare.
Thing One: Gherkin Is Not a Programming Language, But You're Treating It Like One
Your feature files look like this:
