How much does unused code matter for maintenance?

Sebastian Eder, Maximilian Junker, Elmar Jurgens, Benedikt Hauptmann, Rudolf Vaas, Karl-Heinz Prommer
2012 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)  
Software systems contain unnecessary code. Its maintenance causes unnecessary costs. We present tool-support that employs dynamic analysis of deployed software to detect unused code as an approximation of unnecessary code, and static analysis to reveal its changes during maintenance. We present a case study on maintenance of unused code in an industrial software system over the course of two years. It quantifies the amount of code that is unused, the amount of maintenance activity that went
more » ... it and makes the potential benefit of tool support explicit, which informs maintainers that are about to modify unused code.
doi:10.1109/icse.2012.6227109 dblp:conf/icse/EderJJHVP12 fatcat:fs3flm5ohfdc5lounwuvlt52eq