I am new to cucumber and Gherkin. In my new role, we have inherited many very complicated and long running UI automation tests. Updating these feature files is extremely time consuming because in order to test a small change late in the file, you have to wait 10-15 minutes (or longer!) for the test to reach that point.

For my automated junit cucumber tests, the software is started automatically, and queries will run on data that is uploaded to the software after startup. The data loading takes around 12 times longer for the automated cucumber tests compared to when it is loaded in the UI on our main instance.
The tests are run with “mvn clean verify -D[data and licence specifications] -Pcucumber”
I would like to find a way how the data loading is as fast for the cucumber tests as it is in the UI.