The development of Cucumber has been driven by the need for better tools to describe
the expected behaviour of software. It started when a Java tool called JBehave[3] which
was rewritten in Ruby in 2007 by Dan North and released under the name RBehave.[4]
This system was further revised by Dan North and published as Story Runner which ran
under the RSpec test framework.[5] However, this system required all specifications to
be written in the Ruby programming language. David Chelimsky and others added plain
text support[6]. In April 2008, Aslak Hellesøy started the Cucumber project to address
the internal design flaws and usability problems of the RSpec Story Runner.[7] Since then,
over 160,000 developers have further developed and enhanced Cucumber as an open source
software development tool.[2]