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The reason why the @BeforeStep annotation on a step scoped bean in Spring Batch always results in a NullPointerException during testing is that step-scoped beans cannot be injected into test classes. This is because the step context, which is where step-scoped beans are created and managed, is not available during testing.

To avoid this issue, you can either change the scope of the bean to be able to access it during testing, or mock the dependencies of the bean if it has any. Additionally, you could use the JobLauncherTestUtils class provided by Spring Batch to launch and test your jobs without the need for a full application context.