Lint, scan, or coverage step ran but checked nothing

April 30, 2026 · View on GitHub

Playbook ID: empty-quality-check Category: silent_failure Severity: medium Tags: silent-failure, lint, scan, security, coverage, empty-check

What this failure means

A lint, security-scan, or coverage step ran, but the log shows it processed zero files or produced no meaningful report. The step may have exited zero, but the intended quality check never really happened.

Common log signals

No files to lint
0 files checked
0 files scanned
0 packages scanned
Nothing to scan
No source files found
0 files analyzed
Coverage report not generated

Diagnosis

Quality gates often succeed when they have no input. A linter, scanner, or coverage tool can report zero files checked if the target path is wrong, the working directory is unexpected, or the repository checkout is incomplete.

Common causes:

  • The step runs in the wrong directory and sees no source files.
  • The file glob passed to the tool matches nothing.
  • A previous checkout or artifact-download step did not materialize the code.
  • Coverage generation was skipped, so the reporting step has no data.

The result is a false green signal: the quality check step ran, but it did no actual work.

Fix steps

  1. Verify the tool's working directory and file globs.
  2. Confirm the repository or artifact checkout completed before the quality step.
  3. Print the source tree in CI to ensure the expected files are present.
  4. Add a guard that fails when zero files are analyzed unexpectedly.

Validation

Re-run the job and confirm the step reports a positive number of files, packages, or coverage records analyzed.

Likely files to inspect

  • .github/workflows/*.yml
  • .gitlab-ci.yml
  • .golangci.yml
  • .semgrep.yml

Run Faultline

faultline analyze build.log
faultline explain empty-quality-check
faultline workflow build.log --json --mode agent

Search phrases this page answers

  • Lint, scan, or coverage step ran but checked nothing
  • Silent Failure: lint, scan, or coverage step ran but checked nothing
  • Coverage report not generated
  • faultline explain empty-quality-check

Generated from playbooks/bundled/log/silent/empty-quality-check.yaml. Do not edit directly — run make docs-generate.