Cruft
When I started my first internship in college my job was to go through all the jobs configured on a midrange computer system. It was a smaller computer with limited disk space. They were looking for older programs that could be removed because they were no longer in use.
I spent months learning the programming tools and documented thousands of programs, providing information regarding what program was called by what job or other program.
I wondered at the time how a company could get into that condition. After decades of work, it seems inevitable. Stored procedures in a database seem to be a common victim.
Many times I may create a new stored procedure with enhanced functionality over an existing one. The reason I create a new one is because there may be legacy systems still requiring the old code. Of course, the problem with this approach is that the old stored procedure continues to live long after it is no longer needed. I call this condition “Cruft” Cruft is code in your system that is completely obsolete, and not targeted for removal.
Cruft, in my definition, differs from deprecated code. Deprecated code is code that is targeted for deletion in the future, and you are warned to start replacing calls to it, and to not write new code utilizing it. Cruft is code that should have been deprecated, and then deleted. Instead, it just continues to take up space, providing no additional value.
You can even have Data Cruft. How many times have we left tables, or even data, hanging around in our database never to be referenced ever again?
I guessing I’m not the only one experiencing this phenomena. Leave your comment or send an email to btaylor@sswug.org with your Cruft.
Cheers,
Ben
$$SWYNK$$
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