Obsolete Classes

This smell occurs when certain classes are no longer used in a software system. Classes that are no longer in use will burden the system with obviously obsolete functionality. A specific case of this smell occurs when a class implements more than a single responsibility and one of the responsibilities becomes unused in the meantime. Unused classes mainly emerge for two reasons - a developer speculates that the class might eventually be used and a formerly required class becomes obsolete due to refactorings.

Related smells: Unutilized Abstraction Unused Packages

Reference

M. Lippert, S. Roock, “Refactoring in Large Software Projects: Performing Complex Restructurings Successfully”. John Wiley and Sons, 2006.


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