Identifying Extract Class refactoring opportunities using structural and semantic cohesion measures

Abstract

Approaches for improving class cohesion identify refactoring opportunities using metrics that capture structural relationships between the methods of a class, e.g., attribute references. Semantic metrics, e.g., C3 metric, have also been proposed to measure class cohesion, as they seem to complement structural metrics. However, until now semantic relationships between methods have not been used to identify refactoring opportunities. In this paper we propose an Extract Class refactoring method based on graph theory that exploits structural and semantic relationships between methods. The empirical evaluation of the proposed approach highlighted the benefits provided by the combination of semantic and structural measures and the potential usefulness of the proposed method as a feature for software development environments. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.