Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

Comments on Why static code analyzers such as SonarQube indicate a high code complexity for switch statements?

Post

Why static code analyzers such as SonarQube indicate a high code complexity for switch statements?

+3
−0

During a presentation of a pipeline configuration, a colleague showed a SonarQube integration and one of its reports. A warning was caused by overrunning the max value for the code complexity threshold in a function containing a fairly large switch statement.

Why are switch statements considered too complex and what to do about them?

The problematic code was similar to the one below, but containing about double of the case statements:

enum FooStasus
{
    ToBeStarted = 1,
    Starting = 2,
    OnGoing = 3,
    OnHold = 4,
    Stopped = 5
}

private static double GetWeight(FooStasus status)
{
    switch (status)
    {
        case FooStasus.ToBeStarted:
        case FooStasus.Starting: return 1.0;
        case FooStasus.OnGoing: return 2.0;
        case FooStasus.OnHold: return 0.2;
        case FooStasus.Stopped: return 0;
        default: return 0.5;
    }
}

History
Why does this post require moderator attention?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

1 comment thread

Cyclomatic complexity = the number of execution paths (2 comments)
Cyclomatic complexity = the number of execution paths
Lundin‭ wrote about 2 years ago

Since cyclomatic complexity is the number of possible execution paths, it is expected behavior. What one can do is to keep switches simple - if they only check an integer enum which has a contiguous sequence, the switch will get optimized well. In case of floating point or strings etc, not so much. That can be solved by letting the switch work as a LUT and returning a value based on an integer index.

Dirk Herrmann‭ wrote about 2 years ago

Well, more precisely it is the number of binary branches in the control flow plus one. Three ifs in a row correspond to 8 execution paths, but the cyclomatic complexity is just 4. The number of paths can even be infinite (in case of loops), while a loop condition will only contribute 1 to the cyclomatic complexity.