Why is this an issue?

if statements with conditions that are always false have the effect of making blocks of code non-functional. if statements with conditions that are always true are completely redundant, and make the code less readable.

There are three possible causes for the presence of such code:

• An if statement was changed during debugging and that debug code has been committed.
• Some value was left unset.
• Some logic is not doing what the programmer thought it did.

In any of these cases, unconditional if statements should be removed.

Noncompliant code example

  if (true) {
    doSomething
  }
  // ...
  if (false) {
    doSomethingElse
  }

Compliant solution

  doSomething
  // ...

Resources

• MITRE, CWE-489 - Active Debug Code
• MITRE, CWE-570 - Expression is Always False
• MITRE, CWE-571 - Expression is Always True