I am maintaining an open-source project (deterministic open source duplicate-code detector) and a user asked for a feature which I don’t have a clear answer on how to implement.

This seems a very hard problem to solve:

-Tests repeat the same scenario. For a structural detector, this flags as repetition (duplication). However, tests are not something people want to delete from the codebases.

-The repetitions from tests (on purpose) end up looking like undesired code duplication and the tools canno tell which is which.

-One way to solve this would be something like a human in the loop (kind of how linters allow user to accept something once, while keeping the default first run zero-config).

Wonder how you have seen this handle and if anyone have any ideas.

Here is the the repo: https://github.com/Rafaelpta/dupehound

And here is the issue with more detail: https://github.com/Rafaelpta/dupehound/issues/23