Improve your code coverage percentage – delete code!

A recent post showed how to setup Code Tombstones – but there are other , even more insidious pieces of code in a project. The code you know you aren’t using now, but you wrote ahead of time – because  you think it will be useful, or you have plans for it, or any one of a dozen more reasons.

Chances are – you might never get back to it, and it’s just taking up important space. Disk space, or space in version control isn’t worth worrying about though – it’s the space in your brain that is most important for a developer.

You have to let it go.

Here’s the results from my own project – https://www.contractavailability.com/ :

Before deleting unused code:

Summary:
Classes: 30.22% (55/182)
Methods: 51.65% (515/997)
Lines: 40.99% (2080/5075)

After deleting code, and adding a few new tests

Summary:
Classes: 34.52% (58/168)
Methods: 58.57% (523/893)
Lines: 52.18% (2299/4406)

… and all it took was deleting 2,615 lines of PHP classes, tests, Twig templates and yaml configuration – none of which were being used, or were in a state to use right now. The number of unit tests also dropped from 1,003 with 4,026 assertions, down to 984 and 3,966 assertions.

Because of the wonders of Git, and version control…

None of that code need ever be forgotten – I made a quick and simple branch – deleting-code branch and removed a block of related code (at least what I could find) per commit.

* 74a2e09 – (deleting-code) Removed unused commands
* 622295f – Remove deprecated code
* 4783f79 – Removing unused ContractorsList service
* 822e57b – Datatable & DemoTable routing and Javascript
* e28e535 – Remove RecruitersDemo – generated fake data on the fly
* 131864b – Removing the Mailable & Mailing code.
* e5b53b5 – Removing most of the ‘Fakes’ code
* ce8f717 – Start deleting unused code

I’ve also matched those commits with some issues, and plenty of searchable text that I can use to find them in the git log.

I, for example, I decide to come back and take another look at the ‘Mailable’ code (which is intended to make configuring and sending emails easier) – I can just search for ’emails’ or ‘mailable’ and revert just a single commit – and I’m right back where I need to be.  But for now, I want to just do it the ‘hard way’ with simple SwiftMailer-related code before I decide what can be done in an easier way.