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Deleting code gives me a warm fuzzy feeling…

By Robert. Filed in Agile Development  |  
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I love it when I get to delete code. Deleting code, particularly dead code, is such a wonderfully therapeutic exercise. You should try it some time.


That’s why I love it when I find code like the method I just stumbled across. It cast the result of a Hibernate Session.find()[1] call directly to a domain object. But that would never work: instant class cast exception!

Quick scan of the code base: yep, this method never gets used anywhere. And 5 seconds later, this method no longer exists. And only the CVS system has any evidence it ever did…

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[1] sf.net.hibernate.Session.find(String) returns a java.util.List

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2005 at 12:02 PM and is filed under Agile Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

3 Comments

  1. Comment by Michael:
    Saturday, April 16th 2005 at 12:09 PM | 

    Clean code, clean mind.

  2. Comment by Michael:
    Sunday, April 17th 2005 at 7:29 PM | 

    Robert – obviously in the example you had you where 100% confident you could delete it (as it would never work anyway).

    What about in cases <100%… to get the confident sleep-well-at-night feeling after deleting – how do you go about being sure it isn’t used?

    I guess test coverage would be a large part…

  3. Comment by Robert Watkins:
    Monday, April 18th 2005 at 12:55 PM | 

    I read Michael Feathers “Working Effectively With Legacy Code” for ideas. :)

    Oh, and good code inspection tools.

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