Refactor This with Amir Rapson: Zombie Code - Why It’s Bad And Why Your Legacy Systems Could Have It
In this episode of Refactor This, Amir Rapson (CTO and Co-founder of vFunction) describes Zombie Code, also referred to as "dead code", which is code that isn't accessed, monitored, or observed and frequently appears in legacy systems. We discuss how it accumulates, why it's bad from a technical debt and security perspective, and what developers can do about it.
0:00 - Introduction
1:07 - What is ‘zombie code’, aka “dead code”
3:00 - Why is zombie code hard to find?
4:45 - Why can’t we just ignore zombie code?
7:16 - How does zombie code accumulate?
8:31 - Zombie code gets even more complex…
11:30 - Is zombie code a security threat?
14:09 - Can you find zombie code manually, or is AI needed?
17:11 - What does it look like to manually search for zombie code?
21:30 - Best practices to handling zombie code
23:51 - Conclusion