Stale Cucumber Tests Are Silently Bloating Your CI Pipeline

Many software teams carry large collections of Cucumber feature files in their CI pipelines that pass consistently but rarely catch real bugs, adding significant time and compute cost to every code push. Engineering best practice treats a test that never fails as a liability rather than a safety net, since it consumes resources while delivering no meaningful signal. Bloated test suites slow developer feedback loops, increase flakiness, erode confidence in genuine failures, and create ongoing maintenance overhead with every codebase refactor. Experts recommend auditing scenarios with the same rigor applied to performance issues, using CI execution reports to identify scenarios that either never run or have not failed in several sprints. A smaller, targeted test suite provides clearer coverage visibility and faster, more trustworthy pipeline results than a large ceremonial one.