As a software system evolves, its design get
deteriorated and the system becomes difficult to maintain. In
order to improve such an internal quality, the system must be
restructured without affecting its external behavior. The process
involves detecting the design flaws (or code smells) and applying
appropriate refactorings that could help remove such flaws. One
of the design flaws in many object-oriented systems is placing
members in the wrong class. This code smell is called Feature
Envy and it is a sign of inappropriate coupling and cohesion. This
work proposes a metric to detect Feature Envy code smell that
can be removed by relocating the method. Our evaluation shows
promising results as the overall system’s complexity is reduced
after suggested Move Method refactorings are applied.
