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

require return statements to either always or never specify values (consistent-return)

Unlike statically-typed languages which enforce that a function returns a specified type of value, JavaScript allows different code paths in a function to return different types of values.

A confusing aspect of JavaScript is that a function returns undefined if any of the following are true:

• it does not execute a return statement before it exits
• it executes return which does not specify a value explicitly
• it executes return undefined
• it executes return void followed by an expression (for example, a function call)
• it executes return followed by any other expression which evaluates to undefined

If any code paths in a function return a value explicitly but some code path do not return a value explicitly, it might be a typing mistake, especially in a large function. In the following example:

• a code path through the function returns a Boolean value true
• another code path does not return a value explicitly, therefore returns undefined implicitly

function doSomething(condition) {
    if (condition) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return;
    }
}

Rule Details

This rule requires return statements to either always or never specify values. This rule ignores function definitions where the name begins with an uppercase letter, because constructors (when invoked with the new operator) return the instantiated object implicitly if they do not return another object explicitly.

Examples of incorrect code for this rule:

/*eslint consistent-return: "error"*/

function doSomething(condition) {
    if (condition) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return;
    }
}

function doSomething(condition) {
    if (condition) {
        return true;
    }
}

Examples of correct code for this rule:

/*eslint consistent-return: "error"*/

function doSomething(condition) {
    if (condition) {
        return true;
    } else {
        return false;
    }
}

function Foo() {
    if (!(this instanceof Foo)) {
        return new Foo();
    }

    this.a = 0;
}

Options

This rule has an object option:

• "treatUndefinedAsUnspecified": false (default) always either specify values or return undefined implicitly only.
• "treatUndefinedAsUnspecified": true always either specify values or return undefined explicitly or implicitly.

treatUndefinedAsUnspecified

Examples of incorrect code for this rule with the default { "treatUndefinedAsUnspecified": false } option:

/*eslint consistent-return: ["error", { "treatUndefinedAsUnspecified": false }]*/

function foo(callback) {
    if (callback) {
        return void callback();
    }
    // no return statement
}

function bar(condition) {
    if (condition) {
        return undefined;
    }
    // no return statement
}

Examples of incorrect code for this rule with the { "treatUndefinedAsUnspecified": true } option:

/*eslint consistent-return: ["error", { "treatUndefinedAsUnspecified": true }]*/

function foo(callback) {
    if (callback) {
        return void callback();
    }
    return true;
}

function bar(condition) {
    if (condition) {
        return undefined;
    }
    return true;
}

Examples of correct code for this rule with the { "treatUndefinedAsUnspecified": true } option:

/*eslint consistent-return: ["error", { "treatUndefinedAsUnspecified": true }]*/

function foo(callback) {
    if (callback) {
        return void callback();
    }
    // no return statement
}

function bar(condition) {
    if (condition) {
        return undefined;
    }
    // no return statement
}

When Not To Use It

If you want to allow functions to have different return behavior depending on code branching, then it is safe to disable this rule. Source: http://eslint.org/docs/rules/

Duplicated Code

Duplicated code can lead to software that is hard to understand and difficult to change. The Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) principle states:

Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.

When you violate DRY, bugs and maintenance problems are sure to follow. Duplicated code has a tendency to both continue to replicate and also to diverge (leaving bugs as two similar implementations differ in subtle ways).

Tuning

This issue has a mass of 46.

We set useful threshold defaults for the languages we support but you may want to adjust these settings based on your project guidelines.

The threshold configuration represents the minimum mass a code block must have to be analyzed for duplication. The lower the threshold, the more fine-grained the comparison.

If the engine is too easily reporting duplication, try raising the threshold. If you suspect that the engine isn't catching enough duplication, try lowering the threshold. The best setting tends to differ from language to language.

See codeclimate-duplication's documentation for more information about tuning the mass threshold in your .codeclimate.yml.

Refactorings

• Extract Method
• Extract Class
• Form Template Method
• Introduce Null Object
• Pull Up Method
• Pull Up Field
• Substitute Algorithm

Further Reading

• Don't Repeat Yourself on the C2 Wiki
• Duplicated Code on SourceMaking
• Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler. Duplicated Code, p76

For more information visit Source: http://eslint.org/docs/rules/

For more information visit Source: http://eslint.org/docs/rules/