Cognitive Complexity

Cognitive Complexity is a measure of how difficult a unit of code is to intuitively understand. Unlike Cyclomatic Complexity, which determines how difficult your code will be to test, Cognitive Complexity tells you how difficult your code will be to read and comprehend.

A method's cognitive complexity is based on a few simple rules:

• Code is not considered more complex when it uses shorthand that the language provides for collapsing multiple statements into one
• Code is considered more complex for each "break in the linear flow of the code"
• Code is considered more complex when "flow breaking structures are nested"

Further reading

• Cognitive Complexity docs
• Cognitive Complexity: A new way of measuring understandability

Duplicated Code

Duplicated code can lead to software that is hard to understand and difficult to change. The Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle states:

Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.

When you violate DRY, bugs and maintenance problems are sure to follow. Duplicated code has a tendency to both continue to replicate and also to diverge (leaving bugs as two similar implementations differ in subtle ways).

Tuning

This issue has a mass of 55.

We set useful threshold defaults for the languages we support but you may want to adjust these settings based on your project guidelines.

The threshold configuration represents the minimum mass a code block must have to be analyzed for duplication. The lower the threshold, the more fine-grained the comparison.

If the engine is too easily reporting duplication, try raising the threshold. If you suspect that the engine isn't catching enough duplication, try lowering the threshold. The best setting tends to differ from language to language.

See codeclimate-duplication's documentation for more information about tuning the mass threshold in your .codeclimate.yml.

Refactorings

• Extract Method
• Extract Class
• Form Template Method
• Introduce Null Object
• Pull Up Method
• Pull Up Field
• Substitute Algorithm

Further Reading

• Don't Repeat Yourself on the C2 Wiki
• Duplicated Code on SourceMaking
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler. Duplicated Code, p76

function-whitespace

Every function and method declaration should have one blank line before and after itself. An exception to this rule are functions that are declared at the start of a file (only need one blank line after their declaration) or at the end of a file (only need one blank line before their declaration). Comments immediately before a function declaration (no blank lines between them and the function) are considered to be part of the declaration.

Preferred

func function1() {
  var text = 1
  var text = 2
}

function1()

// a comment
func function2() {
  // something goes here
}

struct SomeStruct {

  func function3() {
    // something goes here
  }

  func function4() {
    // something else goes here
  };

}

func function5() {
  // something goes here
}

Not Preferred

func function1() {
  var text = 1
  var text = 2
}
function1()
// a comment
func function2() {
  // something goes here
}

struct SomeStruct {
  func function3() {
    // something goes here
  }

  func function4() {
    // something else goes here
  };
}
func function5() {
  // something goes here
}

comment-whitespace

Prefer at least one whitespace character after a comment opening symbol (//, ///, /*, or /**) and at least one whitespace character before a comment closing symbol (*/).

Preferred

// This is a comment

/// This is a documentation comment

/* This is a
multi-line comment */

/* This is a
multi-line comment
*/

/** This is a
documentation multi-line
comment
*/

Not Preferred

//This is a comment

///This is a documentation comment

/*This is a
multi-line comment*/

/**This is a multi-line
documentation comment */