[slaxo]

"When I write a Cucumber feature, I have to write the Gherkin that describes the acceptance criteria, and the Ruby code that implements the step definitions."

As someone who recently started using cucumber, this was definitely a frustration at first. But after a couple weeks of writing step definitions, and focusing on making them reusable (using some of the tips here: http://coryschires.com/ten-tips-for-writing-better-cucumber-... ), I ended up with a pretty good bank of general steps that I could cobble together into new features without much modification. The result was something much more readable and reusable than if I wasn't using Gherkin on top of the step definitions.

[chrismdp]

Be very careful of over reuse of step definitions, and of Transforms. You'll end up with code that's very difficult to understand as your step codebase grows.

I now tend towards minimal step re-use, lots of one or two-line steps calling into nice clean plain ruby classes which actually do the work of my steps.

I've blogged a lot about how to use cucumber well here: http://chrismdp.com/tag/cucumber