How does Cucumber's step definition matching resolve ambiguous step matches?

When a step's text matches more than one registered step definition's pattern, Cucumber doesn't guess or silently pick one; it fails the step with an explicit "ambiguous step definitions" error, listing every matching candidate, since silently choosing one could hide a real bug where two step definitions unintentionally overlap.

@Given("a user {string}")
public void a_user(String name) { ... }

@Given("a user {word}")
public void a_user_word(String name) { ... }
// Both patterns can match: "a user alice"

Resolving an ambiguity requires making the patterns genuinely distinct rather than relying on Cucumber to pick a "best" match: narrowing one pattern's parameter type so the overlap no longer exists, merging the two step definitions into one if they were meant to do the same thing anyway, or renaming one step's text in the feature file (and its corresponding step definition) to remove the collision entirely.

This strict, fail-fast behavior around ambiguity is a deliberate design choice: a framework that silently picked one candidate could execute the wrong logic for a step without any indication something was wrong, which would be a much harder class of bug to track down than an explicit ambiguity error surfaced immediately at test-run time.