Recommendation of Move Method Refactoring to Optimize Modularization Using Conceptual Similarity

Placement of methods within classes is one of the most important design activities for any object oriented application to optimize software modularization. To enhance interactions among modularized components, recommendation of move method refactorings plays a significant role through grouping similar behaviors of methods. It is also used as a refactoring technique of feature envy code smell by placing methods into correct classes from incorrect ones. Due to this code smell and inefficient modularization, an application will be tightly coupled and loosely cohesive which reflect poor design. Hence development and maintenance effort, time and cost will be increased. Existing techniques deals with only non-static methods for refactoring the code smell and so are not generalized for all types of methods (static and non-static). This paper proposes an approach which recommends 'move method' refactoring to remove the code smell as well as enrich modularization. The approach is based on conceptual similarity (which can be referred as similar behavior of methods) between a source method and methods of target classes of an application. The conceptual similarity relies on both static and non-static entities (method calls and used attributes) which differ the paper from others. In addition, it compares the similarity of used entities by the source method with used entities by methods in probable target classes. The results of a preliminary empirical evaluation indicate that the proposed approach provides better results with average precision of 65% and recall of 63% after running it on five well-known open projects than JDeodorant tool (a popular eclipse plugin for refactorings).