Functional Over-related Classes Bad Smell Detection and Refactoring Suggestions

Bad phenomena about functional over-related classes and confused inheritances in programs will cause difficulty in programs comprehension, extension and maintenance. In this paper it is defined as a new bad smell Functional over-Related Classes. After the analysis, the characteristics of this new smell are transformed to the large number of entities dependency relationships between classes. So after entities dependency information collection and analysis, the bad smell is detected in programs, and corresponding refactoring suggestions are provided based on detection results. The experiments results of open source programs show that the proposed bad smell cannot be detected by current detection methods. The proposed detection method in this paper behaves well on refactoring evaluation, and the refactoring suggestions improve the quality of programs.