Test automation is growing in popularity over the years because teams do not have the time or money to invest in large test teams to make sure that applications work as they are expected. Developers also want to make sure that the code they have created works as they expect it to.

Ruby is a scripting language designed by Yukihiro Matsumoto, also known as Matz. It runs on a variety of platforms, such as Windows, Mac OS, and the various versions of UNIX

"Watir" (pronounced water) stands for "Web Application Testing in Ruby". Watir is an automated test tool which uses the Ruby scripting language to drive the Internet Explorer web browser. Watir is a toolkit for automated tests to be developed and run against a web browser.

Cucumber is a testing framework which supports Behavior Driven Development (BDD). It lets us define application behavior in plain meaningful English text using a simple grammar defined by a language called Gherkin. Cucumber itself is written in Ruby, but it can be used to “test” code written in Ruby or other languages including but not limited to Java, C# and Python