Cognitive Complexity

Introduction

Cognitive complexity is a measure of the mental effort required to understand and reason about a piece of code. It is a metric that assesses how hard the code is to understand, reason about and maintain.

Cognitive complexity is typically determined by factors such as the number of control structures, the depth of nested statements, the number of function calls, and the number of unique variables used in the code. The more complex the code, the harder it is to understand and reason about, and the more prone it is to errors and bugs.

Cognitive complexity can be reduced by breaking complex code into smaller, more manageable chunks, using clear and descriptive variable and function names, and adhering to good coding practices and conventions. There are also tools available that can help assess cognitive complexity and identify areas of the code that may be difficult to understand.

It's important to note that cognitive complexity is not a measure of the quality of the code but a tool to identify the parts of the code that may need refactoring to improve its maintainability.