I think we're in agreement then. It's indeed nice to have a PM that could produce details that can be synthesized into a technical spec. It's nice when the PM

I think we're in agreement then. It's indeed nice to have a PM that could produce details that can be synthesized into a technical spec. It's nice when the PM can work with the customer to actually understand those details. It's nice when PMs can actually care about their products, and work with devs to weigh options. I don't usually have those PMs. Lots of organizations have JIRA Babysitters who show up at your desk whenever the political climate changes to let you know that you should drop the urgent thing he asked you to do yesterday, because there's an urgent thing he's got for you today. The customer though, always wants what they want, and you can carrot instead of stick them, and I have found some cases where I can sit with the customer and do BA/PM with them despite the people with those roles, explain the idea of test automation, show them how it can drive the browser and ask them to describe the application (at a very high level) in natural language in terms of examples, which I translate into Given/When/Then as we are working. I can then explain in status updates "so, the 'simple' scenario for 'user submits an order' is implemented <point to CI output> but we don't yet pass the story for when a coupon code is used. Should we prioritize coupon code scenario or a different feature?" or "So, we have implemented this story according to the examples we were given in May, the behavior you described on this morning's call would read "Given..." instead of "Given...". I can update the story and prioritize that ahead of <whatever>, or should we ship with the original behavior and proceed with <whatever>?" Is it my job or the customer's job to have to do that? Probably not. But it's a way to build a bridge from concrete stupid machines land into fuzzy people land where everything is negotiable, in the absence of the roles or skills to do so without such a tool. Cucumber is indeed poor, the simple 1:1 of step definition strings to their functions and of 1:1 scenario blocks to test executions are unfortunate. I'd like to see a natural language tool where I am specifying invariants to a property-based testing tool. "Given a user" implementation = what does a user mean, well, it has a unicode string 'name' etc. and those map to database model as follows, "when I am on the login page" here are the five pages that have login forms, "When I enter my username" find a field 'username' and fill it with the generated user name ... "Then I should be logged in" logged in users see log out, their username in the corner, have access to their models, logged out users do not, etc. Now this blows up into all the combinatorial options, I find out "hey, if a user has emoji in their password, several invariants are violated." Generally I do not use NL tools or recommend they be used, I'd definitely prefer the environment where they are superfluous as there is a QA automation engineer working with a PM that is willing and able to elicit the necessary details from the customer. Worse yet, all the current implementations seem to be sorely lacking. Just, I don't think all hypothetical NL tools are categorically useless.