Recommendation of move method refactorings using coupling, cohesion and contextual similarity

Abstract

Method placement is one of the most important design activities in any object oriented application. Recommendation of move method refactorings plays a significant role through grouping similar behavior of methods. It is also used as a refactoring technique of feature envy code smell by placing methods into correct classes from the incorrect ones. Due to this code smell, an application will be tightly coupled and loosely cohesive which reflect poor design and hence development and maintenance effort, time and cost will be increased. Existing techniques mostly used only non-static methods for refactoring the code smell and so these approaches are not generalized for all types of methods (static and non-static). This paper proposes a novel approach for recommending move method refactorings to remove the code smell for both types of methods based on coupling, cohesion and context. The results of a preliminary empirical evaluation indicate that the proposed approach provides better results than JDeodorant (a popular eclipse plugin for refactorings).