How much does unused code matter for maintenance?

Author

Eder, Sebastian ; Junker, Maximilian ; Jürgens, Elmar ; Hauptmann, Benedikt ; Vaas, Rudolf ; Prommer, Karl-Heinz

Author_Institution

Inst. fur Inf., Tech. Univ. Munchen, Garching bei München, Germany

fYear

2012

fDate

2-9 June 2012

Firstpage

1102

Lastpage

1111

Abstract

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 into it and makes the potential benefit of tool support explicit, which informs maintainers that are about to modify unused code.

Keywords

approximation theory; program diagnostics; software maintenance; industrial software system; maintenance activity; static analysis; unnecessary code approximation; unnecessary costs; unused code detection; Assembly; Business; Information systems; Maintenance engineering; Production; Software systems; Software maintenance; dynamic analysis; unnecessary code; unused code;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Engineering (ICSE), 2012 34th International Conference on

Conference_Location

Zurich

ISSN

0270-5257

Print_ISBN

978-1-4673-1066-6

Electronic_ISBN

0270-5257

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICSE.2012.6227109

Filename

6227109