Most Teams Are Misusing BDD — Writing Manual Test Cases in Gherkin Syntax

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) frameworks like Cucumber and SpecFlow are widely adopted, but many teams misuse them by writing UI-level, step-by-step Gherkin scenarios that describe how a system works rather than what it should do. This results in test scripts that mirror manual test cases in structured English, offering little real automation value or cross-team collaboration. A key indicator of genuine BDD is whether a developer can implement a feature from the Gherkin spec alone — a test most real-world feature files reportedly fail. The root problem is confusing Gherkin's Given-When-Then structure with true abstraction, which should hide implementation details and capture business intent instead of recording every UI interaction. Organizational inertia often perpetuates the issue, as teams continue maintaining growing Gherkin libraries that product owners and developers rarely read or contribute to.