Exploring the use of rapid type analysis for detecting the dead method smell in Java code

Rapid Type Analysis (RTA) is an algorithm for call graph construction, which is known to be fast and to well approximate virtual method calls. In this paper, we explore its use in the context of refactoring, namely we defined an approach that relies on RTA for the detection of the dead method smell in Java code. We implemented this approach in a prototype of supporting tool we named Dead Code Finder (DCF). We empirically assessed DCF (and the underlying approach) through an experiment on four open-source Java desktop application. We compared DCF with three baseline tools. The results indicate that DCF outperforms these baselines in terms of accuracy of the detected dead methods.