Clean lint, then the run dies immediately on a step nobody wrote. Turning the flag on finds it:
sdods lint -p shop --undefined-steps✖ features/checkout/payment.feature:14 steps/undefined Undefined step: Given I am on the checkout page
1 feature file(s), 1 error(s), 0 warning(s)If it can find it, why is it not on by default? Feels like the most valuable check of the lot.
Accepted answer
Cost. Every other rule is a parse of the feature files and some string comparison against your project yaml — milliseconds, no build. Finding undefined steps means actually generating the specs and letting the generator report what it could not bind, which is the slow part of a run happening before the run.
On a small project the difference is not worth arguing about. On a large one it turns lint from something you can put in a file-save hook into something you wait for, and a check people stop running is worth less than a slower check that runs.
The compromise most teams land on: bare sdods lint in the editor loop and the pre-commit hook, --undefined-steps in CI where the wait is somebody else's.
Also worth saying it is not the only safety net — a run generates specs too, so an undefined step always fails, just later and with a worse message. The flag buys you the failure at lint time with a file and a line number instead of mid-run.
Before you add a new step, check whether the phrasing already exists:
sdods steps list -p shop --grep "checkout page"Most undefined steps we hit turned out to be a near-miss of a step already in the catalogue — "I am on the checkout page" against "I navigate to the checkout page". Reusing the existing phrasing is better than writing a second step that does the same thing.
Worth knowing the opposite direction is a separate command rather than a lint rule. Steps nobody calls do not stop anything, so they are not part of this:
sdods steps list -p shop --unusedDifferent risks, which is why they are split. A feature referring to a step that does not exist cannot run at all; a step definition nobody calls is dead code you clean up when you feel like it.
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