Kamaljeet Singh

You may need to learn both Appium and Cucumber because they serve different purposes. Appium is a tool for automating mobile testing, allowing you to code automation steps to perform operations on elements within a mobile application.

Cucumber is a library used to design a Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) framework using the Gherkin language (Given/When/Then). It can be integrated with Appium or Selenium to create an end-to-end framework.

If you want to use a BDD framework, you need to learn both Appium and Cucumber.

If you prefer to use a Page Object Model (POM) framework, you only need to learn Appium and how to design the POM framework.

The purpose of a Test Management Tool is to write and execute test cases, as well as to maintain a traceability matrix. Cucumber is a Test Automation tool that allows you to write test cases (scenarios) using Gherkin. You can execute automated test scenarios using Cucumber's TestRunner; however, it does not maintain traceability between manual and automated test cases. Additionally, Cucumber's reporting can be stored in the file system.

Therefore, a Test Management Tool is needed to maintain traceability between automated and manual scenarios and to store the pass and fail status of each test case. Integrating Cucumber with a Test Management Tool is essential for managing test cases and execution statuses effectively. An example of this integration is JIRA with XRAY, where XRAY can be combined with Cucumber for end-to-end scenario execution.

The two different files that are used in Cucumber are:

1. Feature files : Scenarios are defined in the feature files using Gherkin language (Given/When/Then)

2. Step definition files: Step definition files consists of steps that links them with one or more Gherkin steps. When Cucumber executes a Gherkin step, it looks for the matching file tht has same step written otherwise it throws an error and suggest you to add step in step definition file.

Cucumber has support for different languages, It is used to create BDD framework but can be integrated with multiple tools. It can be integrated with Selenium and Java for Page Object Model framework with page factory. Similarly it can be integrated with node js tools like webdriver IO and playwright as well. It has also support for Selenium an C# but there another tool i.e. specflow is used which is similar to Cucumber. Thus the main objective of Cucumber is to develop BDD framework on top of Page Object Model in multiple languages.

Robot Framework supports BDD style but it is only limited to Gherkin keywords Given/When/Then. I haven't seen people integrating Cucumber with Robot Framework in any project. You can find pytest-bdd library similar to cucumber which can be integrated with pytest not with Robot Framework, Robot Framework is using keyword driven framework.