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article · IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering · 2018

A Multi-Study Investigation into Dead Code

Simone Romano, Christopher Vendome, Giuseppe Scanniello, Denys Poshyvanyk

Cited by 37Abstract and details only

Abstract

Dead code is a bad smell and it appears to be widespread in open-source and commercial software systems. Surprisingly, dead code has received very little empirical attention from the software engineering research community. In this paper, we present a multi-study investigation with an overarching goal to study, from the perspective of researchers and developers, when and why developers introduce dead code, howthey perceive and cope with it, and whether dead code is harmful. To this end, we conducted semi-structured interviews with software professionals and four experiments at the University of Basilicata and the College of William & Mary. The results suggest that it is worth studying dead code not only in the maintenance and evolution phases, where our results suggest that dead code is harmful, but also in the design and implementation phases. Our results motivate future work to develop techniques for detecting and removing dead code and suggest that developers should avoid this smell.

Cite this paper

APA 7

Romano, S., Vendome, C., Scanniello, G., & Poshyvanyk, D. (2018). A Multi-Study Investigation into Dead Code. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 46(1), 71–99. https://doi.org/10.1109/tse.2018.2842781

MLA 9

Romano, Simone, et al. “A Multi-Study Investigation into Dead Code.” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 46, no. 1, 2018, pp. 71–99, https://doi.org/10.1109/tse.2018.2842781.

Chicago

Romano, Simone, Christopher Vendome, Giuseppe Scanniello, and Denys Poshyvanyk. 2018. “A Multi-Study Investigation into Dead Code.” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 46 (1): 71–99. https://doi.org/10.1109/tse.2018.2842781.

Harvard

Romano, S. et al. (2018) ‘A Multi-Study Investigation into Dead Code’, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 46(1), pp. 71–99. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1109/tse.2018.2842781.

BibTeX
@article{romano2018multi,
  title = {{A Multi-Study Investigation into Dead Code}},
  author = {Romano, Simone and Vendome, Christopher and Scanniello, Giuseppe and Poshyvanyk, Denys},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering},
  volume = {46},
  number = {1},
  pages = {71--99},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.1109/tse.2018.2842781}
}

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