How to find Cucumber steps that are not used

Question

I've been working with Cucumber for about a year and have been continually refactoring the features and step definitions along the way. I have tons of steps defined across many files and I can't help but feel like many of them are no longer needed. Is there a way to find which cucumber step definitions are no longer being used?

Ivan

Answer 1

The stepdefs formatter can do this, e.g.:

cucumber --dry-run -f stepdefs

It will print 'NOT MATCHED BY ANY STEPS' for any non-matches.

If you have any steps that are only used by other steps, then omit --dry-run to get accurate results. With --dry-run, the steps are not executed and cucumber will not find out that the referred step is actually used.

Smite

Sounds like what I want, but when I run that I get Using the default profile... uninitialized constant Object::Factory (NameError) – Ivan

Please post the full stack trace – Smite

I found this in the cucumber book last night and apparently it doesn't load the env.rb file which explains why things are failing. I was able to get it to run after moving things around and it's exactly what I want. Thanks! – Ivan

I think I ended up using -f usage instead of -f stepdefs though. – Ivan

If you have "@wip" features this will report any steps used in those as unused. does anyone know how to include "@wip" features in this build? – Homeless

Can you elaborate on what things needed to be moved around? I get the same uninitialized constant error, but with capybara. – Surly

To fix errors @PeterBrown alluded to, I added require_relative "env" to the top of the first file alphabetically in features/support/ (I'm guessing cucumber loads the support files alphabetically for some reason) – Avina

Thanks @NathanWallace. The reason for this is the --dry-run flag, which omits loading env.rb (as stated in the cucumber --help). – Dynamometry

Hi guys, Is there a way to detect all steps in feature files that do not have any step definition methods? Like a check that returns list of all step sentences from feature files? – Jockey

Answer 2

You could try running your stories under a coverage tool such as simplecov.

By default it will probably exclude test code such as cucumber steps since normally one is interested in how much of the app code is covered rather than how much of the test code, but that should be easy to reverse.

Vortical

Answer 3

For me

cucumber-js --dry-run --format usage

did the job.

Output print is something like

│ some feature test name │ UNUSED  │ src\step_definitions\team-edit-steps.ts:24│

Woolfell