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

Fields in a Serializable class must themselves be either Serializable or transient even if the class is never explicitly serialized or deserialized. For instance, under load, most J2EE application frameworks flush objects to disk, and an allegedly Serializable object with non-transient, non-serializable data members could cause program crashes, and open the door to attackers. In general a Serializable class is expected to fulfil its contract and not have an unexpected behaviour when an instance is serialized.

This rule raises an issue on non-Serializable fields, and on collection fields when they are not private (because they could be assigned non-Serializable values externally), and when they are assigned non-Serializable types within the class.

Noncompliant Code Example

public class Address {
  //...
}

public class Person implements Serializable {
  private static final long serialVersionUID = 1905122041950251207L;

  private String name;
  private Address address;  // Noncompliant; Address isn't serializable
}

Compliant Solution

public class Address implements Serializable {
  private static final long serialVersionUID = 2405172041950251807L;
}

public class Person implements Serializable {
  private static final long serialVersionUID = 1905122041950251207L;

  private String name;
  private Address address;
}

Exceptions

The alternative to making all members serializable or transient is to implement special methods which take on the responsibility of properly serializing and de-serializing the object. This rule ignores classes which implement the following methods:

 private void writeObject(java.io.ObjectOutputStream out)
     throws IOException
 private void readObject(java.io.ObjectInputStream in)
     throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException;

See

• MITRE, CWE-594 - Saving Unserializable Objects to Disk
• Oracle Java 6, Serializable
• Oracle Java 7, Serializable

Duplicated string literals make the process of refactoring error-prone, since you must be sure to update all occurrences.

On the other hand, constants can be referenced from many places, but only need to be updated in a single place.

Noncompliant Code Example

With the default threshold of 3:

public void run() {
  prepare("action1");                              // Noncompliant - "action1" is duplicated 3 times
  execute("action1");
  release("action1");
}

@SuppressWarning("all")                            // Compliant - annotations are excluded
private void method1() { /* ... */ }
@SuppressWarning("all")
private void method2() { /* ... */ }

public String method3(String a) {
  System.out.println("'" + a + "'");               // Compliant - literal "'" has less than 5 characters and is excluded
  return "";                                       // Compliant - literal "" has less than 5 characters and is excluded
}

Compliant Solution

private static final String ACTION_1 = "action1";  // Compliant

public void run() {
  prepare(ACTION_1);                               // Compliant
  execute(ACTION_1);
  release(ACTION_1);
}

Exceptions

To prevent generating some false-positives, literals having less than 5 characters are excluded.

Most checks against an indexOf value compare it with -1 because 0 is a valid index. Any checks which look for values >0 ignore the first element, which is likely a bug. If the intent is merely to check inclusion of a value in a String or a List, consider using the contains method instead.

This rule raises an issue when an indexOf value retrieved either from a String or a List is tested against >0.

Noncompliant Code Example

String color = "blue";
String name = "ishmael";

List<String> strings = new ArrayList<String> ();
strings.add(color);
strings.add(name);

if (strings.indexOf(color) > 0) {  // Noncompliant
  // ...
}
if (name.indexOf("ish") > 0) { // Noncompliant
  // ...
}
if (name.indexOf("ae") > 0) { // Noncompliant
  // ...
}

Compliant Solution

String color = "blue";
String name = "ishmael";

List<String> strings = new ArrayList<String> ();
strings.add(color);
strings.add(name);

if (strings.indexOf(color) > -1) {
  // ...
}
if (name.indexOf("ish") >= 0) {
  // ...
}
if (name.contains("ae") {
  // ...
}