We want to reduce cucumber's signal to noise ratio--currently errors are hidden within pages and pages of success.
You don't care in detail about what has passed, simply that stories ran and passed. What you care about is which scenarios no longer work, have broken, need updating or aren't yet complete.
We don't show all the steps and a backtrace unless there's a problem.
If you want the full details you can use a --trace option.
To give feedback whilst running we show a status that sticks to the bottom of the terminal (similar to the pagination the 'more' command shows).
The status would look like:
Running features/login_logout.feature: Public home page > visiting the log in page
which is:
Running (feature file): (feature title) > (scenario title)
When a scenario fails we output the failure straight away to the output stream, above the status line.
After we finish running all the features we show a summary of pending steps, pending scenarios, failed scenarios and some totals.
Pending steps:
<copy and paste>
Pending scenarios:
features/login_logout.feature: Logging in and logging out
line 6 visiting the login page
line 12 logging in with the correct email and password
line 35 logging out
Failed scenarios:
features/homepage.feature: The public homepage
line 6 public viewer browsing the homepage
Summary:
58 scenarios
9 failed steps
13 skipped steps
2 undefined steps
241 passed steps