Deep Learning Based Feature Envy Detection Boosted by Real-World Examples

Feature envy is one of the well-recognized code smells that should be removed by software refactoring. A major challenge in feature envy detection is that traditional approaches are less accurate whereas deep learning-based approaches are suffering from the lack of high-quality large-scale training data. Although existing refactoring detection tools could be employed to discover real-world feature envy examples, the noise (i.e., false positives) within the resulting data could significantly influence the quality of the training data as well as the performance of the models trained on the data. To this end, in this paper, we propose a sequence of heuristic rules and a decision tree-based classifier to filter out false positives reported by state-of-the-art refactoring detection tools. The data after filtering serve as the positive items in the requested training data. From the same subject projects, we randomly select methods that are different from positive items as negative items. With the real-world examples (both positive and negative examples), we design and train a deep learning-based binary model to predict whether a given method should be moved to a potential target class. Different from existing models, it leverages additional features, i.e., coupling between methods and classes (CBMC) and the message passing coupling between methods and classes (MCMC) that have not yet been exploited by existing approaches. Our evaluation results on real-world open-source projects suggest that the proposed approach substantially outperforms the state of the art in feature envy detection, improving precision and recall by 38.5% and 20.8%, respectively.