How to find unused/dead code in java projects

Question

What tools do you use to find unused/dead code in large java projects? Our product has been in development for some years, and it is getting very hard to manually detect code that is no longer in use. We do however try to delete as much unused code as possible.

Suggestions for general strategies/techniques (other than specific tools) are also appreciated.

Edit: Note that we already use code coverage tools (Clover, IntelliJ), but these are of little help. Dead code still has unit tests, and shows up as covered. I guess an ideal tool would identify clusters of code which have very little other code depending on it, allowing for docues manual inspection.

Answer 1

Eclipse can show/highlight code that can't be reached. JUnit can show you code coverage, but you'd need some tests and have to decide if the relevant test is missing or the code is really unused.

Answer 2

An Eclipse plugin that works reasonably well is Unused Code Detector.

It processes an entire project, or a specific file and shows various unused/dead code methods, as well as suggesting visibility changes (i.e. a public method that could be protected or private).

Answer 3

In Eclipse Goto Windows > Preferences > Java > Compiler > Errors/Warnings
and change all of them to errors. Fix all the errors. This is the simplest way. The beauty is that this will allow you to clean up the code as you write.

Screenshot Eclipse Code :

Answer 4

DCD is not a plugin for some IDE but can be run from ant or standalone. It looks like a static tool and it can do what PMD and FindBugs can't. I will try it.

P.S. As mentioned in a comment below, the Project lives now in GitHub.

Answer 5

There is a Java project - Dead Code Detector (DCD). For source code it doesn't seem to work well, but for .jar file - it's really good. Plus you can filter by class and by method.

Answer 6

Code coverage tools, such as Emma, Cobertura, and Clover, will instrument your code and record which parts of it gets invoked by running a suite of tests. This is very useful, and should be an integral part of your development process. It will help you identify how well your test suite covers your code.

However, this is not the same as identifying real dead code. It only identifies code that is covered (or not covered) by tests. This can give you false positives (if your tests do not cover all scenarios) as well as false negatives (if your tests access code that is actually never used in a real world scenario).

I imagine the best way to really identify dead code would be to instrument your code with a coverage tool in a live running environment and to analyse code coverage over an extended period of time.

If you are runnning in a load balanced redundant environment (and if not, why not?) then I suppose it would make sense to only instrument one instance of your application and to configure your load balancer such that a random, but small, portion of your users run on your instrumented instance. If you do this over an extended period of time (to make sure that you have covered all real world usage scenarios - such seasonal variations), you should be able to see exactly which areas of your code are accessed under real world usage and which parts are really never accessed and hence dead code.

I have never personally seen this done, and do not know how the aforementioned tools can be used to instrument and analyse code that is not being invoked through a test suite - but I am sure they can be.