Middle Man §

Signs and Symptoms §

If a class performs only one action, delegating work to another class why does it exist at all?

### Reasons for the Problem

This smell can be the result of overzealous elimination of Message Chains. In other cases, it can be the result of the useful work of a class being gradually moved to other classes. The class remains as an empty shell that doesn’t do anything other than delegate.

Treatment §

• If most of a method’s classes delegate to another class, Remove Middle Man is in order.

Payoff- Less bulky code.

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### When to Ignore

Don’t delete middle man that have been created for a reason:

• A middle man may have been added to avoid interclass dependencies.
• Some design patterns create middle man on purpose (such as Proxy or Decorator).