Inspectopedia 2025.3 Help

Overly coupled class

Reports classes that reference too many other classes.

Classes with too high coupling can be very fragile, and should probably be split into smaller classes.

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.

OverlyCoupledClass
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 | Class metrics

Configure the inspection:

  • Use the Class coupling limit field to specify the maximum allowed coupling for a class.

  • Use the Include couplings to java system classes option to specify whether references to system classes (those in the java.or javax. packages) should be counted.

  • Use the Include couplings to library classes option to specify whether references to any library classes should be counted.

Inspection ID: ClassCoupling

Inspection options

Here you can find the description of settings available for the Overly coupled class inspection, and the reference of their default values.

Class coupling limit

Option ID:

m_limit

Default value:

15
Include couplings to java system classes

Option ID:

m_includeJavaClasses

Default value:

Not selected
Include couplings to library classes

Option ID:

m_includeLibraryClasses

Default value:

Not selected

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 OverlyCoupledClass

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

Inspection Details

By default bundled with:

IntelliJ IDEA 2025.3, Qodana for JVM 2025.3,

Last modified: 03 December 2025