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

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

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

Unused parameters are misleading. Whatever the value passed to such parameters is, the behavior will be the same.

Noncompliant Code Example

function doSomething($a, $b) { // "$a" is unused
  return compute($b);
}

Compliant Solution

function doSomething($b) {
  return compute($b);
}

Exceptions

Functions in classes that override a class or implement interfaces are ignored.

class C extends B {

  function doSomething($a, $b) {     // no issue reported on $b
    compute($a);
  }

}

See

• MISRA C++:2008, 0-1-11 - There shall be no unused parameters (named or unnamed) in nonvirtual functions.
• MISRA C:2012, 2.7 - There should be no unused parameters in functions
• CERT, MSC12-C. - Detect and remove code that has no effect or is never executed
• CERT, MSC12-CPP. - Detect and remove code that has no effect

UnusedFormalParameter

Since: 0.2

Avoid passing parameters to methods or constructors and then not using those parameters.

Example

class Foo
{
    private function bar($howdy)
    {
        // $howdy is not used
    }
}

Source https://phpmd.org/rules/unusedcode.html#unusedformalparameter

CamelCaseClassName

Since: 0.2

It is considered best practice to use the CamelCase notation to name classes.

Example

class class_name {
}

Source