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 private or protected access modifiers which are applied to a singleton method. These access modifiers do not make singleton methods private/protected. private_class_method can be used for that.

Example:

# bad

class C
  private

  def self.method
    puts 'hi'
  end
end

Example:

# good

class C
  def self.method
    puts 'hi'
  end

  private_class_method :method
end

Example:

# good

class C
  class << self
    private

    def method
      puts 'hi'
    end
  end
end