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

StaticAccess

Since: 1.4.0

Static access causes unexchangeable dependencies to other classes and leads to hard to test code. Avoid using static access at all costs and instead inject dependencies through the constructor. The only case when static access is acceptable is when used for factory methods.

Example

class Foo
{
    public function bar()
    {
        Bar::baz();
    }
}

Source https://phpmd.org/rules/cleancode.html#staticaccess

ShortVariable

Since: 0.2

Detects when a field, local, or parameter has a very short name.

Example

class Something {
    private $q = 15; // VIOLATION - Field
    public static function main( array $as ) { // VIOLATION - Formal
        $r = 20 + $this->q; // VIOLATION - Local
        for (int $i = 0; $i < 10; $i++) { // Not a Violation (inside FOR)
            $r += $this->q;
        }
    }
}

Source https://phpmd.org/rules/naming.html#shortvariable