Introduction
This blog will discuss the most asked Cucumber interview questions (which is a Behaviour Driven Development Tool) and their answers. Cucumber has testing tools for automating test cases such that one can comprehend those easily irrespective of the stakeholder's technical expertise. Cucumber offers a script-based design pattern that can create tests which both developers and customers can follow easily. In the beginning, developers used Ruby to create the Cucumber test framework, making test case maintenance easier by reducing code duplication.
Every feature in an application is a feature file that one must create with a ".feature" extension. These feature files are the sources where the details, descriptions and definitions of various features are stored.

Let us discuss the most asked Cucumber interview questions now.
Cucumber Interview Questions for Freshers
1) What is Cucumber?
Cucumber is a testing framework/tool that follows a behaviour-driven development (BDD) testing paradigm. A Behaviour Driven Development strategy majorly aims to aggregate various types of responsibilities of a project like business requirements, business logic and its technical implementations, Q.A. and various project stakeholders such as business analysts, developers, customers etc. to build an understanding of the system without requiring in-depth knowledge of the technical details and components.
Testers use it to create test cases to help evaluate the program's behaviour. It is a tool that one can utilise to automate acceptance tests written in logical language that customers can also understand. It's most frequently used to develop and write acceptance tests for web apps based on their features' behaviour.
2) What is the underlying principle behind the Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) paradigm?
The Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) paradigm is a transformed approach that stems from best practices from Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) and Test Driven Development (TDD). BDD simulates TDD and ATDD by
applying the "Five Why's" principles to each proposed set of user stories so that its purpose is related to the business outcomes. The Five Why's principles are a set of iterative interrogative approaches for uncovering the cause-and-effect of the root of a problem. The primary use of this technique is to unravel the core cause of an issue or a problem by asking "Why?" repeatedly. Each response serves as the foundation for the next set of questions.
3) What basic concepts must one know while working with Cucumber?
One must be aware of the following set of primary jargon in Cucumber:-
Feature: ‘Feature’ represents the collection of a relevant set of scenarios and provides a high-level description of any software feature.
Rule: 'Rule' is used to express any single business rule/requirement that one should follow. It adds to the information about a set feature.
Example: It is a practical illustration of a required business rule. It comprises a series of steps.
Given: 'Given' depicts the steps one can use to describe the system's initial context - the scenario's scene. It usually refers to an event that has occurred in the past.
When: 'When' is to describe an occurrence or an action in a system, and 'When' is employed to represent a user interacting with the system or an event generated by another system.
Then: 'Then' are steps employed to indicate an anticipated outcome or result.
Background: A 'Background' helps one give the situations that follow some context. It can have one or more Given steps executed before each scenario but after any Before hooks.
4) What is a scenario in Cucumber Testing?
A 'Scenario' is a fundamental Gherkin structure in which every scenario begins with the "Scenario:" keyword (or a localised version) and ends with a scenario title. Every feature has one or more scenarios, each of which has one or more steps.
An example of a scenario can be illustrated by considering the following:
‘Scenario’ − Verify a user’s Cart Functionality.
Explanation: When a user clicks on the My Cart option, one should take them to the My Cart page.
5) What is Gherkin Language?
'Gherkin' is a readable business language that allows one to define business activities without getting too caught up in implementation specifics. It's a domain-specific language for defining a set of spec tests using Cucumber. It describes various use cases in plain English and helps users remove logic elements from a behaviour testing requirement.
6) What is a Scenario Outline in the Cucumber framework?
To understand Scenario Outline better, one can consider a situation when the customer is required to run a test scenario repeatedly. Assuming one needs to ensure that the login feature is functional for all kinds of subscribers. This necessitates executing the login functionality scenario consequently and continuously. Redundtly copying and pasting an identical set of instructions to just a re-run scenario is not a practical approach. Gherkin supports another framework here, i.e. the scenario outline, to help with this. Here, the scenario outline is similar to a scenario, with the only exception being several inputs provided.
Example:-
Scenario Outline - Registering Feature for a website.
Explanation: The website can have different users, which one must consider while implementing the registering functionality.
7) What is a ‘feature’ in Cucumber?
A 'Feature' in a cucumber project can be described as a stand-alone unit or functionality. A feature frequently includes a specific list of scenarios to test for with it. The Feature File is a file in which we store features, descriptions of features, and situations to be evaluated. For each feature under test, it is recommended that a separate feature file be created. A feature file has a ".feature" extension. One can make and add as many feature files as required.
Example of the same:-
For an e-commerce website, one can have the following set of features:-
Users can register/sign up on the website.
Users can sign in to their accounts using their credentials.
Users can add products to their cart.
Users can check out products that they added to their carts.
Users can pay for their items.
Users can sign out from the website.
8) What are the functions of cucumbers?
Various tasks are performed by cucumbers in the software development process, mainly when behaviour-driven development (BDD) is used.
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Testing: By converting Gherkin scenarios into test stages, Cucumber aids automated testing, ensuring the software performs as intended.
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Collaboration: By offering a single language (Gherkin) for specifying and confirming requirements, it fosters collaboration amongst stakeholders, developers, and testers.
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Specification: Cucumber's support for Gherkin syntax for authoring executable specifications makes describing and recording intended software behaviour simple.
- Integration: Cucumber is adaptable to multiple development environments since it integrates with various programming languages and testing frameworks.
9) How to test API in Cucumber?
Follow the following steps to test API using Cucumber:
- Create feature files detailing the behaviour of the API with Gherkin scenarios.
- To perform API calls and assertions, implement step definitions in the programming language of your choice (for instance, Java).
- Use HTTP client libraries to send API calls and check results, such as RestAssured.
- To arrange and run particular API test suites, tag scenarios.
- Run Cucumber tests with a test runner like JUnit or TestNG, then examine the outcomes.
10) What is debugging in Cucumber?
In Cucumber, debugging entails finding and fixing problems with your step definitions, feature files, or entire test suite. Typical debugging methods include:
- Printing Debug Information: To understand programme flow and variable values, use print statements or logging to produce information at various places in your step definitions.
- Using an integrated development environment (IDE), add breakpoints in your code to halt execution while debugging and allow you to view variables.
- Cucumber frequently offers a "dry run" option that examines the syntax of your step definitions without running tests, assisting in detecting potential problems.
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Reviewing Error Messages: To determine where errors and exceptions occurred, look over error messages and stack traces.
Review feature files to ensure that Gherkin syntax and scenario definitions are correct.
11) What are the Steps in the context of Cucumber?
'Step' in Cucumber connects Gherkin steps to programming code. The mapping between each step of the scenario defined in the feature file and a code of the function to be executed is stored in the steps definition file. Step definitions carry out the actions that that step should perform. Step definitions hard-wire various specifications to their respective implementations.
12) What are annotations with respect to Cucumber?
Annotations are specific types of texts that have been pre-defined and have a specified meaning in Cucumber. It instructs the compiler/interpreter on what to do when the program runs. There is the following set of annotations that are defined and can be used in Cucumber:
Given: ‘Given’ specifies the various requirements for running a test.
Ex - Given I have an account on code studio.
When: ‘When’ establishes the beginning/starting point for any test scenario.
Ex - When I log in to code studio.
Then: 'Then' contains the expected results of a test to be executed.
Ex - Then registration should be successful.
And: 'And' is used Between any two statements to specify the logical AND condition. It can be combined with GIVEN, WHEN, and THEN statements.
Ex - When I enter my account number AND CVV.
But: ‘Or’ denotes a logical OR relationship between two propositions. OR can also be combined with GIVEN, WHEN, and THEN statements.
Ex - Then I should be logged in BUT I must enter the OTP.
13) What are hooks in Cucumber? How can they be used in Cucumber?
Hooks are sets of instruction statements that execute before or after every Cucumber scenario in an execution cycle. It enables one to control the development workflow better and decrease code redundancy. Setting up the web driver and terminating the web driver session resembles a test setup. When dealing with different scenarios, it's best to do the setup and clean up only once. Hooks are used for adding optimisations in Cucumber tests.
Certain preconditions, such as executing a program, creating/setting up a database connection, preparing test data, etc., may sometimes be required. Several postconditions could also be needed, such as ending/closing the database connections, closing the browser, refreshing test data, logging out of the program etc. Cucumber handles all of these situations using hooks.
One can use the @Before and @After methods to define hooks anywhere in the project or the step definition layers. One can define hooks to get executed before any other test situations and after all test scenarios have been completed.
14) What are tags in Cucumber, and why are they important?
It appears to be simple when one only has one, two, or maybe five situations in a feature file. Practically, however, this does not occur. In a single feature file, one may have 10, 20, or even more scenarios for each feature under test. Tags could reflect various purposes (smoke test/regression test), perspectives (developer/QA/BA), and statuses (ready for execution/work in progress).
Tags in Cucumber provide one with a way to run scenarios in a specific sequence from a runner file. One can label each situation with a useful tag. Later, in the runner file, we may specify which tag (and hence which scenario(s)) Cucumber should run. "@" is the first character in a tag. One can use any relevant content after "@" to define your tag. Example - '@InitialTest'
15) What is a Dry Run in Cucumber?
The primary goal of a Cucumber dry run is to verify compilation faults in a series of written instructions and compile the Step Definitions and Feature files. A dry run's value might change and can be toggled between true and false. A Dry run has the value false by default and is present in the Test Runner Class file.
Suppose the value of a dry run is defined as true; then, as a result, Cucumber will check all the steps in the Feature file. Inside the Step Definition file, it will also check the implementation instructions/statements of the steps in the Feature file.
If any defined steps in the Feature file are missing their implementations, then a message would be thrown. The @CucumberOptions has a dry run parameter that provides options to configure the test parameters.
16) What are Cucumber parameters?
You can provide dynamic values to your step definitions using cucumber parameters, which are also known as placeholders or variables in Gherkin scenarios. They are denoted by angle brackets (< >) and serve as placeholders for actual data when running tests. Parameters enhance reusability and flexibility in your scenarios. For example, <username> and <password> can be parameters for logging into different accounts. In step definitions, you can capture and use these values for testing.
17) What is meant by a Cucumber profile?
While testing a feature using Cucumber, cucumber profiles make it simple to define groupings of the tests that are present in the feature files so that one can choose to execute only a subset of those rather than all. It was created and added in Cucumber to help people save time. A user can reuse commonly used cucumber flags defined in the cucumber.yml file.