Near Duplicate Step

near-duplicate-step

Matcher wording is close and meaningful handlers share enough ordered behavior, with compatible structural or canonical-call evidence. Similar prose alone and unrelated actions do not qualify. Review the pair and consolidate only when both definitions express the same behavior.

The required handler-similarity floor defaults to 0.70 and is configurable through nearDuplicateHandlerSimilarity (0.5–1.0). Raising it demands more handler evidence, which suppresses systematically-named steps whose matchers are near-identical but whose handlers act on different things; lowering it toward 0.5 restores the older, looser behaviour.

When handlers are not structurally equivalent, they must share canonical action evidence: either a call action, including direct and fluent forms such as page.click() and page.locator(...).click(), or an assertion with the same matcher and subject shape. Expected assertion values and polarity remain semantic during final similarity verification. Decorated class methods must also have compatible runtime-affecting semantics: async versus sync, static versus instance, generator, getter, and setter differences veto a near-duplicate match. Call evidence includes inline callback bodies syntactically; deferred assertions are not treated as directly executed assertions. Deferred assertion sequences must match in value, polarity, and order for a near-duplicate finding. Shared wrapper calls cannot compensate for different deferred assertions. This conservatively skips fuzzy matches when one callback adds or reorders assertions; exact matcher checks still run.

Language support

JavaScript/TypeScript	Cucumber-Ruby
Wording similarity plus handler-behavior overlap.	Wording similarity plus handler-behavior overlap: action streams for ordinary handlers whose every construct is modeled, configured assertion streams otherwise; a conflicting assertion is one differing event, as in JavaScript. Handlers with an unmodeled construct or an untrusted receiverless expect chain must be exactly equal.

Cucumber-Ruby support is experimental; see Cucumber-Ruby.

Back to the rule index.