An artificial class is a class solely created for technical reasons.

Artificial classes are not meaningful concepts outside the software.

Note that it's not merely the identifier which makes a class artificial. A class DatabaseQuerySender is artificial. The name tells that this is an abstraction on code which sends queries to a database. The abstraction comes from the code, from the solution instead of the problem. Classes Query, Database and also DatabaseConnection are natural classes. They are meaningful concepts outside the software. However, relabeling DatabaseQuerySender to Database does not make it a natural class if the abstraction it stands for is not changed accordingly. A solution which is ML-compliant would rather distribute the functionality of the DatabaseQuerySender to the classes Database, DatabaseConnection and Query.

ActionListener, ConnectionAdapter, BeanFactory, InvocationHandler, ApplicationController …

• Natural Class
• Artificial Coupling

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