Can someone please answer a few questions about the Cucumber for Appian framework?

Hello everyone, 

I have recently joined a company with the role of a Senior QA Automation Engineer. I am going to be building an automation framework with Cucumber for Appian and I have a few questions. 

I have finished downloading the Cucumber API files and after importing into IntelliJ I notice that all of the core code is pretty much in the jar. Do you suggest that this jar be extracted so that I am able to make changes to the code if needed? Are there ever times that it may be necessary to add or modify any of the methods? I am used to building a Cucumber framework from scratch and writing the step definitions and background code so this is very new to me. Let me give an example: Assume that I wanted to do some feature that had too many parameters to be practical for an examples section in a feature file. It's technically possible to use Apache POI with excel files to take the approach of data-driven testing inside of a Cucumber framework for certain cases.

I've also been informed that with Appian it's not really possible to achieve CI/CD with automatically triggering the automation every time a new build happens. I am told that the builds happen by manually moving the files (or something along those lines). I am used to using Jenkins for builds where you push your git branch and the automation smoke testing is automatically triggered. 

I am a very avid believer of DevOps and QAOps and it's something I was hoping to onboard here however if I can't have test automation that triggers on new code deployments then it's not possible to achieve real CI/CD. If anyone knows a way to do this I'd love to hear it. 

Lastly, I am wondering about advanced reporting to UIs such as TestRail. Is it possible to use the before/after methods in the test runner to save my report or manipulate the data in some way that I can feed it to a reporting UI?

Thanks in advance for answering my questions. 

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