A Confirmation Study on the Removal of Dead Code from Java Desktop Applications

In this paper, we present the results of a confirmation study on the impact of dead-method removal on the internal structure of source code, time to compile source code, and space to store compilation results (i.e., executable code). To that end, we cleaned up 23 open-source Java desktop applications hosted on GitHub from their dead methods, obtaining two versions: one with dead methods (i.e., original version) and another one without them (i.e., cleaned version). For each of these applications, we compared its versions (original and cleaned) and found that, after removing dead methods, the internal structure of source code significantly improves, while the time to compile source code significantly diminishes as well as the space to store compilation results. We also performed correlation analyses that allowed us to conclude that the more dead methods are removed, the greater the improvement to the internal structure of source code and the less space to store executable code.