[sokrates]

Most points raised by the auther are criticism with specific Cucumber step implementations. I understand that this is not criticism of Cucumber-the-tool but Cucumber-the-process, but of course, if you're using your tools wrong, nobody's going to just fix your process.

The awkward step naming, and the routing issue, are all with the default steps of an integration of something like Webrat or Capybara. In recent projects (and I think this is the default for newer versions of Capybara), no steps are automatically generated for you. You have to choose the level of detail you want to operate at yourself. Comparing character count of a method call and a Gherkin step is also a rather useless metric.

The "doesn't share code with my test env" issue is a trivial fix: move your test-but-also-cucumber-env code from test_helper.rb into another file, then require it from both cucumber's env.rb and test_helper.rb.

Personally, I write Cucumber features exactly because they mean I don't have to think about routing, or paths, or syntax. I try to put myself in the role of the user and write down what I want to accomplish, and how. A key indicator for reasonably abstracted feature files might be the equivalence "I changed something in a .feature file" IFF "I have to communicate a change to my users."

But if you want to shoot yourself in the foot, you really have to do it yourself.