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 the cyclomatic complexity of methods is not higher than the configured maximum. The cyclomatic complexity is the number of linearly independent paths through a method. The algorithm counts decision points and adds one.

An if statement (or unless or ?:) increases the complexity by one. An else branch does not, since it doesn't add a decision point. The && operator (or keyword and) can be converted to a nested if statement, and ||/or is shorthand for a sequence of ifs, so they also add one. Loops can be said to have an exit condition, so they add one. Blocks that are calls to builtin iteration methods (e.g. `ary.map{...}) also add one, others are ignored.

def each_child_node(*types)               # count begins: 1
  unless block_given?                     # unless: +1
    return to_enum(__method__, *types)

  children.each do |child|                # each{}: +1
    next unless child.is_a?(Node)         # unless: +1

    yield child if types.empty? ||        # if: +1, ||: +1
                   types.include?(child.type)
  end

  self
end                                       # total: 6

Checks for excessive nesting of conditional and looping constructs.

You can configure if blocks are considered using the CountBlocks option. When set to false (the default) blocks are not counted towards the nesting level. Set to true to count blocks as well.

The maximum level of nesting allowed is configurable.

Checks for the use of YAML class methods which have potential security issues leading to remote code execution when loading from an untrusted source.

NOTE: Ruby 3.1+ (Psych 4) uses Psych.load as Psych.safe_load by default.

Safety:

The behavior of the code might change depending on what was in the YAML payload, since YAML.safe_load is more restrictive.

Example:

# bad
YAML.load("--- !ruby/object:Foo {}") # Psych 3 is unsafe by default

# good
YAML.safe_load("--- !ruby/object:Foo {}", [Foo])                    # Ruby 2.5  (Psych 3)
YAML.safe_load("--- !ruby/object:Foo {}", permitted_classes: [Foo]) # Ruby 3.0- (Psych 3)
YAML.load("--- !ruby/object:Foo {}", permitted_classes: [Foo])      # Ruby 3.1+ (Psych 4)
YAML.dump(foo)