Its one of many tools that is founded in one of the two key organizational realizations underlying Agile software development that, unfortunately, is completely ignored everywhere that pretends that they are "doing Agile".

The other one, and the one that is talked about more, is control of the methodology by the individual dev team, rather than as an external dictate from outside.

But the one relevant to Cucumber is that development isn't an activity that the dev team does alone, but a high-contact relationship between the dev team and the people working in the application domain that the software serves.

Like many Agile tools, it is completely broken when divorced from those organizational principles. Unfortunately, while lots of shops are "Agile", those "Agile" implementations are almost invariably completely divorced from those principles, and are the same kind of consultants-sold-this-canned-buzzword-bingo-approach-to-management-and-now-it-is-imposed-on-the-software-team-we-keep-walled-off-from-business thing that the entire Agile movement was a reaction against.