Dead Code

Dead code is code that is no longer referenced by other parts of the production codebase, often because it has been made obsolete.

At first glance Dead Code may seem harmless, but it most definitely is not. At minimum, it is purely unnecessary code bloat, but at worst Dead Code has the potential to ruin a company.

Additionally, Dead Code has a habit of obscuring options for potential improvement as well as acting as additional friction when considering changes in parts of the codebase that may require the Dead Code to be updated.

Identification

A good IDE will help immensely for identifying Dead Code. Most IDEs will automatically flag a block of Dead Code with a warning indicator, often accompanied by a much lighter font color to further draw attention to the problem.

Do be careful with code that your IDE may have the usage context available for. The external APIs of a library or framework glue code are two examples of code that may be flagged as Dead Code, but has real usages the IDE is unable understand.

Remedy

Fortunately Dead Code is easy to fix. Delete it.

Variations

Unused import Unused constant Unused field Unused method parameter Unreachable code block within a method (think code within if/else if/else) Unused method Unused class Unused interface