Silent Citation Decay: How a Green Coverage Check Missed 23 Wrong Line Numbers

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A developer discovered that all 23 line-number citations in a specification table were incorrect by one or two lines, yet an automated coverage check remained green throughout. The check only counted whether citation cells were non-empty, never verifying whether the references actually pointed to the correct content. The citations had been accurate when first written but silently drifted as other edits shifted line positions in the source file. To fix this, the developer replaced line-number-dependent references with quoted text snippets, allowing the tool to detect whether a citation had moved, gone missing, or remained valid. This shift from positional to keyed checking meant the system could now name the specific failing row rather than simply returning a misleading count of zero uncovered items.

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