Inspectopedia 2025.2 Help

Overly coupled method

Reports methods that reference too many other classes. Methods with too high coupling can be very fragile and should be probably split into smaller methods.

Each referenced class is counted only once no matter how many times it is referenced.

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.

OverlyCoupledMethod
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 | Method metrics

Configure the inspection:

  • Use the Method coupling limit field to specify the maximum allowed coupling for a method.

  • Use the Include couplings to java system classes option to count references to classes from javaor javax packages.

  • Use the Include couplings to library classes option to count references to third-party library classes.

Inspection options

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

Method coupling limit

Default value:

10
Include couplings to java system classes

Default value:

Not selected
Include couplings to library classes

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 OverlyCoupledMethod

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 2025.2, Qodana for JVM 2025.2,

Last modified: 18 September 2025