Refused Bequest (RB)

Description:

A subclass inherits some of the methods and the data of its parents. This design flaw refers to the case when the subclasses don't use the members of their ancestors that were particularly designed to be reused by the descendants. This might be a sign that the hierarchy is wrong, although if the child class refuses only the inherited implementation things might not be that bad; but if the descendant refuses the interface then the hierarchy is definitely wrong.

We identify three ways of using an inherited member:

• call of a method defined in the superclass
• access of an attribute defined in the superclass
• override a virtual method declared/defined in the superclass

Refactoring:

• Push Down Method
• Push Down Field
• Replace Inheritance with Delegation