A method is not used by any other class.
Make the method private.
Refactoring often causes you to change decisions about the visibility of methods. It is easy to spot cases in which you need to make a method more visible: another class needs it and you thus relax the visibility. It is somewhat more difficult to tell when a method is too visible. Ideally a tool should check all methods to see whether they can be hidden. If it doesn’t, you should make this check at regular intervals.
A particularly common case is hiding getting and setting methods as you work up a richer interface that provides more behavior. This case is most common when you are starting with a class that is little more than an encapsulated data holder. As more behavior is built into the class, you may find that many of the getting and setting methods are no longer needed publicly, in which case they can be hidden. If you make a getting or setting method private and you are using direct variable access, you can remove the method.
- Check regularly for opportunities to make a method more private.
Use a lint-style tool, do manual checks every so often, and check when you remove a call to a method in another class.
Particularly look for cases such as this with setting methods.
- Make each method as private as you can.
- Compile after doing a group of hidings.
The compiler checks this naturally, so you don’t need to compile with each change. If one goes wrong, it is easy to spot.
|This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License|