GodExpo: an automated god structure detection tool for Golang
Published in In 2019 IEEE/ACM 3rd International Workshop on Refactoring (IWoR 2019), 2019
Recommended citation: Yasir, R. M., Asad, M., Galib, A. H., Ganguly, K. K., & Siddik, M. S. (2019, May). GodExpo: an automated god structure detection tool for Golang. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 3rd International Workshop on Refactoring (IWoR) (pp. 47-50). IEEE.
Abstract
God Class is a class that threatens maintainability and understandability of code by performing most of the work alone. Various tools exist that can detect God Class of Java or C++ programs, however, there is no existing tool for detecting God Class(Structure) in Golang. Although Golang is not an object-oriented language, it offers structures which are similar to classes in OOP as they can contain fields and methods. Unlike OOP, methods of a structure can be defined on any file in the package of Golang. This paper presents a tool entitled GodExpo to detect God Structures in Golang programs by calculating metrics namely Weighted Method Count, Tight Class Cohesion, and Access to Foreign Data. In addition, GodExpo can provide version wise result to observe the evolution of God structures. To evaluate GodExpo, an experiment has been conducted on several versions of two open source Golang projects and the tool successfully found God structures in all versions of those projects.
Keywords
God Class, Code Smell, Golang, OOP Metrics