Getting involved in Open Source software can be fun, as it gives you a glimpse into the future for upcoming versions. One project I’ve been following over the past couple of years is Cucumber for the Java Virtual Machine. There’s a noticeable upcoming change that will remove cucumber-java8, which will certainly affect users of that dependency.

Cucumber-JVM is a framework for writing end to end tests in natural language, with each line backed by a Java method. Each Java method has a regular expression of natural language lines to match, and lines should only match one such pattern. On a recent assignment I was tasked with modernizing a fairly large cucumber test suite, and going through the steps I found a lot of Java methods that were not being called from the natural language feature files anymore. To identify and remove these unused steps, and prevent any new unused steps in the future, I contributed the following plugin to Cucumber 4.4.0 through: - https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm/pull/1648 - https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm/pull/1634

It can be run easily through: