Do you find cyclomatic complexity a useful measure?

Question

I\'ve been playing around with measuring the cyclomatic complexity of a big code base.

Cyclomatic complexity is the number of linearly independent paths through a pr

Answer 1

It's useful to me in the same way that big-O is useful: I know what it is, and can use it to get a gut feeling for whether a method is good or bad, but I don't need to compute it for every function I've written.

I think simpler metrics, like LOC, are at least as good in most cases. If a function doesn't fit on one screen, it almost doesn't matter how simple it is. If a function takes 20 parameters and makes 40 local variables, it doesn't matter if its cyclomatic complexity is 1.

Answer 2

Yes, we use it and I have found it useful too. We have a big legacy code base to tame and we found alaraming high cyclomatic complexity. (387 in one method!). CC points you directly to areas that are worth to refactor. We use CCCC on C++ code.

Answer 3

Until there is a tool that can work well with C++ templates, and meta-programming techniques, it's not much help in my situation. Anyways just remember that

"not all things that count can be measured, and not all things that can be measured count" Einstein

So remember to pass any information of this type through human filtering too.

Answer 4

I frequently measure the cyclomatic complexity of my code. I've found it helps me spot areas of code that are doing too much. Having a tool point out the hot-spots in my code is much less time consuming than having to read through thousands of lines of code trying to figure out which methods are not following the SRP.

However, I've found that when I do a cyclomatic complexity analysis on other people's code it usually leads to feelings of frustration, angst, and general anger when I find code with cyclomatic complexity in the 100's. What compels people to write methods that have several thousand lines of code in them?!

Answer 5

There's a Java metric called CRAP4J that empirically combines cyclomatic complexity and JUnit test coverage to come up with a single metric. He's been doing research to try and improve his empirical formula. I'm not sure how widespread it is.

Answer 6

Cyclomatic Complexity is just one composant of what could be called Fabricated Complexity. A while back, I wrote an article to summarize several dimensions of code complexity: Fighting Fabricated Complexity

Tooling is needed to be efficient at handling code complexity. The tool NDepend for .NET code will let you analyze many dimensions of the code complexity including code metrics like: Cyclomatic Complexity, Nesting Depth, Lack Of Cohesion of Methods, Coverage by Tests...

including dependencies analysis and including a language (Code Query Language) dedicated to ask, what is complex in my code, and to write rule?