Cognitive Complexity — An Overview and Evaluation

As a measure of understandability, Cyclomatic Complexity is widely regarded as unsatisfactory, but until December 2016 it was the only one available. This paper describes Cognitive Complexity, a new metric designed specifically to measure understandability, and a brief survey of Cognitive Complexity issues in a subset of open source projects under static analysis on SonarCloud. From this analysis, an assessment is made of whether Cognitive Complexity is accepted or rejected by the developers of each project.