Apr

9

For quite a while now, we’ve thought that cyclomatic complexity was a pretty straightforward thing: less was better. Some recent research, covered over at InfoQ, has shown that maybe it’s not as straightforward as that.

For those who aren’t familiar, cyclomatic complexity numbers (CCNs, herein) are really pretty straightforward: they’re a measure of how many paths there are through a particular function. You start off with a natural score of one (because there’s one entry and one exit, therefore one path) and you add one for each loop or branch you encounter. They’re not a perfect measure of paths, but they do a pretty good job. There’s a close cousin which considers the nesting of control structures as well, but CCN seems to be more widely used.

For quite a while, we’ve assumed that there’s a linear relation between CCN a number of undesirable characteristics in code: fragility, bug rate, and lack of cohesion to name a few. I’m sure it probably causes sciatica as well. It’s reasonable to assume that a lower CCN is better. But here’s where it goes a little strange. According to the research

The results show that the files having a CC value of 11 had the lowest probability of being fault-prone (28%). Files with a CC value of 38 had a probability of 50% of being fault-prone. Files containing CC values of 74 and up were determined to have a 98% plus probability of being fault-prone.

So in general, you don’t want to be going out and creating functions with a CCN with a value of 400 (I’ve seen this, and no, you don’t want to know…), it appears that scores of somewhere less than the teens is not so bad.

The research isn’t without it’s critics. The scores are apparently aggregated for classes rather than the methods in them, so the results may be misleading. But it’s in intriguing result nonetheless.

The message here? If you’re using CCN as an indicator of where to look for problems (and you should be), you may want to recalibrate your radar for unnecessary complexity to be a little higher.


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