Removing Dead Code

Last week I was working on code coverage.  One of the results I saw is that some of the source code we own is not used by any of our testing - it is 0% covered.  Digging into this, I found out that this code is not used at all by Tableau so I intend to start removing it from our codebase.

Code that is not used by the product you are working on is often referred to as  "dead code" and there are a few ways this can happen.  One obvious way is that existing code functionality simply gets provided by something else.  Let's say you had a very slow Bubble Sort routine to sort a list.  Once you learn a faster algorithm to sort, like Quick Sort, you start using the Quick Sort instead.  If you are not diligent when making the code change to use Quick Sort, the Bubble Sort code can get left behind.  It is not used at this point and becomes "dead code."

Similarly, if you need to implement sorting, you could try Quick Sort, Insertion Sort and Merge Sort (for instance).  Once you profile the time spent by each routine and generate the test data, you can make a decision about which routine to use.  Again, if you don't remove the routines you don't use, they become "dead code." 

After digging into the code coverage numbers, I found a few instances of the second case.  Since this code is not used at all, it doesn't get compiled so that helps mitigate having it around.  But it still results in a good amount of unneeded code stored on everyone's hard drive, maintained in our repository and so on.  The best practice is to just get rid of it and that is what I am working on now.

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John