We Hate Code - The !joy of Maintaining Dead Code
summary
Claims that large Java codebases contain massive unused logic surface up: one customer measures 70% unused and personal testing finds only 37% used; industry estimates peg maintenance cost for dead code at 20–40% of effort. Practical fixes use JaCoCo or a Java agent plus Flight Recorder to log runtime usage, ASM or the JDK class‑file API to list bytecode, and then OpenRewrite recipes or Azul Intelligence Cloud to annotate with @Deprecated(forRemoval=...) and remove after 6–12 months of monitoring and human review.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Intro
- 4:45What is Dead Code
- 7:29Where does it come from
- 12:21Zombie Code
- 16:25Tombstone Logging
- 18:55Finding Unused Code
- 20:13Other Solutions
- 21:28What is a Java Agent
- 22:54How to find it
- 26:59How it works
- 34:39Conclusion
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