The Cucumber for Java Book

Environment-Specific Step Definitions

A common request is to run the scenarios differently depending on the environment they’re running in. For example, we may not have access to external web services or production databases from our CI environment, so we’ll want to use test doubles when we run our scenarios there. On the other hand, we’ll use the real systems when we run our scenarios in system integration test (SIT) or user acceptance test (UAT) environments.

We’ll pass Cucumber an environment variable to let our step definitions know how to behave. It’s up to us to build the conditional logic that implements that behavior, using standard software development techniques.

Creating the Seam

Michael Feathers introduces the concept of a seam ...