[BadassFractal]

I worked on enterprise projects "at a similar company" with a few hundred "top notch" engineers. We had no more than 30% coverage, most of it from SDETs. No tests were being written by the devs before checking in for months, the test devs were understaffed, unqualified and thus behind. At one point someone made a checkin that prevented login from happening. Nobody noticed for a full work week, until that version made it into preproduction and someone finally attempted to login. Apparently hundreds of mils spent on the project can't buy you a team able to write above high-school level code.

I can see the usefulness of SDETs in doing system / end-to-end testing or testing of really obscure scenarios, but most of the test writing should belong to devs. I love the Rails approach to UT, functional and integration test split. The first time you try BDD, especially if you're coming from an after-the-fact testing culture like the one above, you almost want to cry from joy. I agree that Cucumber might a bit of an overkill, but perhaps I don't get it. For a non-prototypey project you should absolutely add other types horizontal testing like performance, security..