Shotgun Surgery §

Shotgun Surgery resembles Divergent Change but is actually the opposite smell. Divergent Change is when many changes are made to a single class. Shotgun Surgery refers to when a single change is made to multiple classes simultaneously.

Signs and Symptoms §

Making any modifications requires that you make many small changes to many different classes.

### Reasons for the Problem A single responsibility has been split up among a large number of classes. This can happen after overzealous application of [Divergent Change](/smells/divergent-change).

Treatment §

• Use Move Method and Move Field to move existing class behaviors into a single class. If there’s no class appropriate for this, create a new one.- If moving code to the same class leaves the original classes almost empty, try to get rid of these now-redundant classes via Inline Class.

Payoff §

• Better organization.
• Less code duplication.
• Easier maintenance.