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

Checks that there are no repeated bodies within if/unless, case-when, case-in and rescue constructs.

With IgnoreLiteralBranches: true, branches are not registered as offenses if they return a basic literal value (string, symbol, integer, float, rational, complex, true, false, or nil), or return an array, hash, regexp or range that only contains one of the above basic literal values.

With IgnoreConstantBranches: true, branches are not registered as offenses if they return a constant value.

Example:

# bad
if foo
  do_foo
  do_something_else
elsif bar
  do_foo
  do_something_else
end

# good
if foo || bar
  do_foo
  do_something_else
end

# bad
case x
when foo
  do_foo
when bar
  do_foo
else
  do_something_else
end

# good
case x
when foo, bar
  do_foo
else
  do_something_else
end

# bad
begin
  do_something
rescue FooError
  handle_error
rescue BarError
  handle_error
end

# good
begin
  do_something
rescue FooError, BarError
  handle_error
end

Example: IgnoreLiteralBranches: true

# good
case size
when "small" then 100
when "medium" then 250
when "large" then 1000
else 250
end

Example: IgnoreConstantBranches: true

# good
case size
when "small" then SMALL_SIZE
when "medium" then MEDIUM_SIZE
when "large" then LARGE_SIZE
else MEDIUM_SIZE
end