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 is a measure of how hard the control flow of a method is to understand. Methods with high Cognitive Complexity will be difficult to maintain.

See

• Cognitive Complexity

In the interest of code clarity, static members of a base class should never be accessed using a derived type's name. Doing so is confusing and could create the illusion that two different static members exist.

Noncompliant Code Example

class Parent {
  public static int counter;
}

class Child extends Parent {
  public Child() {
    Child.counter++;  // Noncompliant
  }
}

Compliant Solution

class Parent {
  public static int counter;
}

class Child extends Parent {
  public Child() {
    Parent.counter++;
  }
}