Cognitive Complexity

Cognitive complexity is a way of measuring how difficult a piece of code is for a human to understand. Unlike metrics that focus purely on structure or execution paths, cognitive complexity tries to reflect the mental effort required to read, follow, and reason about code.

<?php

if ($a) {
    if ($b) {
        if ($c) {
            // hard to follow
        }
    }
}

if ($a == 1) {}
elseif ($a === 2) {}
elseif ($a === 3) {}
elseif ($a === 4) {}
else {}

?>

Documentation

Related : Cyclomatic Complexity, Complexity, Metrics, Streamlining

Related packages : rarst/phpcs-cognitive-complexity, tomasvotruba/cognitive-complexity