Feature envy

Reports the Feature Envy code smell. The warning is thrown when a method calls methods on another class three or more times. Calls to library classes, parent classes, contained or containing classes are not counted by this inspection. Feature envy is often an indication of the fact that this functionality is located in a wrong class.

Example:

  class JobManager {
    // Warning: this method calls three methods
    // of the Job class
    // It would be better to move this chain of
    // calls to the Job class itself.
    void performJob(Job job) {
      job.beforeStart();
      job.process();
      job.afterProcessing();
    }
  }

Locating this inspection

By ID

Can be used to locate inspection in e.g. Qodana configuration files, where you can quickly enable or disable it, or adjust its settings.

FeatureEnvy

Via Settings dialog

Path to the inspection settings via IntelliJ Platform IDE Settings dialog, when you need to adjust inspection settings directly from your IDE.

Settings or Preferences | Editor | Inspections | Java | Abstraction issues

Suppressing Inspection

You can suppress this inspection by placing the following comment marker before the code fragment where you no longer want messages from this inspection to appear:

//noinspection FeatureEnvy

More detailed instructions as well as other ways and options that you have can be found in the product documentation:

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2

Inspection Details
By default bundled with:	IntelliJ IDEA 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2,

Last modified: 18 September 2025