While you were writing some new shiny features today, the following happened:

• Someone accidentally disabled a feature flag gating the most important product feature that shipped years ago
• Someone spent a day fixing tests not realizing the code being tested is only executed by these tests
• Someone missed a deadline because the build system was building long forgotten libraries instead of the code they committed to ship

The common denominator for all these cases - dead code.

Aggressively cleaning code that is no longer needed or used can, and will make your team more effective because it reduces the overall complexity of the codebase. This, in turn, unlocks a lot of benefits:

• bugs and mistakes are easier to avoid
• new features can be delivered faster
• less time is spent on (unneeded) maintenance

Deprecating rarely used features takes it to the next level.

Try it, and you may turn your team into a team of the proverbial “10x engineers”.

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