Identification of opportunities for move method refactoring using decision theory

Abstract

The early versions of object-oriented software system may function correctly, but sometimes its internal structure may not be well designed. Some classes may be god classes with several different behaviors. God classes have low cohesion in which some of their methods should be moved to another class. Finding a target method of a class to be moved to another class is a challenging problem. This paper proposes an approach to identity opportunity for move method using decision theory. The approach searches for candidate classes and chooses only one class with the highest coupling value which is used as decision criteria of Laplace method. A preliminary evaluation is performed on object-oriented software to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed method can improve the design quality of the source code.