I am working on a product and I am using Pivotal Tracker to write user stories, but I am quite new to BDD and XP, and newer to Cucumber. So I am getting confused by the terminology a little bit. What is the difference between a story and a cucumber feature? Both are simple descriptions consisting of three parts--actor, action and business value. Right? So if I already have a story written in Pivotal Tracker, should I just copy that directly into the Cucumber feature? Can one story have multiple features?
What do you think?
A feature is a fully-fledged piece of functionality, ready to go live. For instance, a feature might be a user profile, complete with registration page, validation, pictures, etc.
In BDD-terminology, a story is a small slice through the feature which is functional, and on which we can get feedback. For instance, we might produce the registration without a profile page, and without validation. Validation might be another story. Pictures can be another.
It can take weeks to produce some of the more complex features, taking into account architecture, new technologies, domain learning, etc. - so a story lets us get feedback more quickly than this.
You might be interested in learning about Feature Injection - BDD in the analysis space. We use the template quite a lot for both stories and features:
In order to <achieve a goal>
As <the stakeholder who wants the goal>
I want <something>
I tend not to worry too much about whether what I'm doing is a feature or a story, as long as I'm getting feedback as quickly as possible.