ModiChecker: Accessibility Excessiveness Analysis Tool for Java Program

Abstract

In object-oriented programs, access modifiers are used to control the accessibility of fields and methods from other objects. Choosing appropriate access modifiers is one of the key factors for easily maintainable programming. In this paper, we propose a novel analysis method named Accessibility Excessiveness (AE) for each field and method in Java program, which is discrepancy between the access modifier declaration and its real usage. We have developed an AE analyzer - ModiChecker which analyzes each field or method of the input Java programs, and reports the excessiveness. We have applied ModiChecker to various Java programs, including several OSS, and have found that this tool is very useful to detect fields and methods with the excessive access modifiers.