Abstract: The existence of feature envy phenomena can affect the stability and maintainability of the system.Current feature envy detection methods fail to consider the sensitivity of object types,leading to low detection accuracy.To address this issue,an inter-procedure feature envy detection method based on higher-order function is proposed.The method stores the computation process of the local reference ratios within a procedure with parameters as a summary in the form of higher-order function,according to predefined feature envy measurement rules.During inter-procedure detection,it retrieves the higher-order feature envy detection summary of the target method at the method call site.Based on the correlation between formal and actual parameters,the actual types of the formal parameters are substituted into the summary to compute the final local reference ratios set,which is used to detect the presence of feature envy and corresponding envy sets.The paper integrates several Java projects as a benchmark test set and selects the IntelliJDeodorant and IDE Inspection tools for comparison experiments.Results show that the proposed methodimproves detection accuracy for envy instances by 16.6% over IDE Inspection and by 1.3 times over IntelliJDeodorant.In terms of envy sets detection accuracy,it improves by 37.2% over IDE Inspection and by 1.6 times over IntelliJDeodorant.

Key words: Feature envy detection, Type-sensitive, Inter-procedure, High-order function, Function summary, Java