Cucumber for Java requires that you specify the packages in which your step definitions exist. At runtime, cucumber uses some hack to try to list all the classes in this package (it’s a hack because class loaders never really support the listing operation), loads them one by one, and finds those that have step definition annotations like @When and @Then. This is both poor user experience (can’t you just find my step definitions!?) and poor performance (loading all the classes under a package is expensive.)
So I wrote a library that offers a much better alternative. It uses annotation indexer to create an index of step definitions and hooks at compile time. Thanks to JSR-269, this happens automatically on Java 6 and later. With the index in /META-INF/annotations, runtime can load all the step definitions quite efficiently.
The library contains a Backend implementation, so you should be able to just add it to your project dependency, and cucumber should automatically find this (and thus all your step definitions and hooks.)
By the way, this horrible technique of scanning jar files, listing class files, and finding annotations from there is unfortunately commonly seen in many other libraries. This was a necessary evil in the days of Java 5, but it should really die in this day and age. If you realy on the classpath scanning, please switch to annotation indexer, which provides the backbone functionality of this POTD.