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POSeeking clarifications about structuring code to reduce cyclomatic complexity
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copied!<p>Recently our company has started measuring the cyclomatic complexity (CC) of the functions in our code on a weekly basis, and reporting which functions have improved or worsened. So we have started paying a lot more attention to the CC of functions.</p> <p>I've read that CC could be informally calculated as 1 + the number of decision points in a function (e.g. if statement, for loop, select etc), or also the number of paths through a function...</p> <p>I understand that the easiest way of reducing CC is to use the Extract Method refactoring repeatedly...</p> <p>There are somethings I am unsure about, e.g. what is the CC of the following code fragments?</p> <p>1)</p> <pre><code>for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) Console.WriteLine("Hello"); </code></pre> <p>And</p> <pre><code>Console.WriteLine("Hello"); Console.WriteLine("Hello"); Console.WriteLine("Hello"); </code></pre> <p>They both do the same thing, but does the first version have a higher CC because of the for statement?</p> <p>2)</p> <pre><code>if (condition1) if (condition2) if (condition 3) Console.WriteLine("wibble"); </code></pre> <p>And</p> <pre><code>if (condition1 && condition2 && condition3) Console.WriteLine("wibble"); </code></pre> <p>Assuming the language does short-circuit evaluation, such as C#, then these two code fragments have the same effect... but is the CC of the first fragment higher because it has 3 decision points/if statements?</p> <p>3)</p> <pre><code>if (condition1) { Console.WriteLine("one"); if (condition2) Console.WriteLine("one and two"); } </code></pre> <p>And</p> <pre><code>if (condition3) Console.WriteLine("fizz"); if (condition4) Console.WriteLine("buzz"); </code></pre> <p>These two code fragments do different things, but do they have the same CC? Or does the nested if statement in the first fragment have a higher CC? i.e. nested if statements are mentally more complex to understand, but is that reflected in the CC?</p>

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