How much does unused code matter for maintenance?

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.

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