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

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

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 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.

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 32.

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

Looks for expressions containing multiple binary operators where precedence is ambiguous due to lack of parentheses. For example, in 1 + 2 * 3, the multiplication will happen before the addition, but lexically it appears that the addition will happen first.

The cop does not consider unary operators (ie. !a or -b) or comparison operators (ie. a =~ b) because those are not ambiguous.

NOTE: Ranges are handled by Lint/AmbiguousRange.

Example:

# bad
a + b * c
a || b && c
a ** b + c

# good (different precedence)
a + (b * c)
a || (b && c)
(a ** b) + c

# good (same precedence)
a + b + c
a * b / c % d

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