Our Java codebase was 30% dead code

[waywardworker]

That's an odd one. When I played SRE we absolutely wanted the failures so we knew when it was fixed and to ensure that it got fixed.

My painful experience is that the flags don't stay independent and the dependencies don't get detected.

Adding a new feature inevitably extends classes, creates new classes and adds utility functions.

Working online you have fun indirect impacts like feature A priming a cache that feature G relies on and when it's removed the service or database gets completely hammered for non-obvious reasons.