Unit Tests Obscure Dead Code

I’ve been having a bit of a clean-up in our codebase as I know of various large bits of functionality that for one reason or another never made it into production and now they are just becoming a distraction. Even though we are using the thoroughly useful ReSharper, which can point out some obvious dead code, it doesn’t perform enough analysis to see past code that is only referenced by unit tests.

Oh the irony… I spend all that time banging on about writing unit tests and now I’m cursing their existence because they stop me from seeing dead code! But my team is using NUnit, not some obscure framework, and ReSharper has native support for NUnit, so it’s not out of the realms of possibility that JetBrains could “join the dots” and provide a facility to highlight dead code that only has unit tests for it. If you’re writing a library I presume you’d want this feature off by default :-) but if you’re writing an application you’d probably like it on. Of course if you have a really large codebase and you’ve split it to ensure you only build what you need then I guess it becomes less accurate and false positives are not exactly a confidence builder. I’d still prefer to have the choice of enabling a “be aggressive” flag when I’m in cleanup mode.

Clearly there are other analysis tools, like NCover, that could help determine dead code, but I’m not talking about squeezing every last line of redundant code out (which would probably involve actually running it and then deciding whether you covered enough scenarios), but just pointing out the really obvious stuff like unused classes, methods, interface  implementations etc.

Anyway, until such time as JetBrains (or a suitable alternative) comes entirely to my rescue I’m using the following semi-automatic ReSharper assisted approach:-

1. Load the solution and remove all unit test projects from it
2. Use ReSharper to show up dead code
3. Delete dead code
4. Goto 2 to find what new dead code ReSharper has unearthed[+]
5. Reload the solution with unit test projects
6. Delete redundant unit tests
7. Fix any false positives[*]

Of course having said all that someone will go and point out that I should RTFM or show me how FxCop already does this… Please do!

 

[+] ReSharper uses the term “heuristically determined unused method”, and yet it still doesn’t point out a lot of dead code - you often have to go and delete the unused callers before it will mark something as dead. And these aren’t methods with deep call graphs, maybe only 1 or two deep. Perhaps it’s more pessimistic when interfaces are involved?

[*] Yes we have other dependent code (such as various PowerShell scripts) that means you can’t just carelessly swing the axe about but it’s pretty obvious what would be called externally.