Question

I am wondering how to reduce the Cyclomatic Complexity of the following code and if this is even something that I should be worried about.

Please refer to the method ValuePojo.getSomething()
(Please don’t worry about the variable naming, this has been re-written for clarity in this question)

public class ValuePojo
{
    private ValueTypeEnum type;

    private BigDecimal    value1;

    private BigDecimal    value2;

    private BigDecimal    value3;

    public ValuePojo()
    {
        super();
    }

    /**
     * This method reports as "HIGH Cyclomatic Complexity"
     * 
     * @return
     */
    public BigDecimal getSomething()
    {
        if (this.type == null)
        {
            return null;
        }

        switch (this.type)
        {
            case TYPE_A:
            case TYPE_B:
            case TYPE_C:
            case TYPE_D:
                return this.value1;

            case TYPE_E:
            case TYPE_F:
            case TYPE_G:
            case TYPE_H:
                return this.value2;

            case TYPE_I:
            case TYPE_J:
                return this.value3;
        }

        return null;
    }
}

Answer 1

The Cyclomatic Complexity is determined by the number of branches of execution in your code. if - else blocks, switch statements – all increase the Cyclomatic complexity of your code and also increase the number of test cases you would need to ensure appropriate code coverage.

To reduce complexity in your code, I would suggest you remove the case statements that do not have a defined behavior and replace it with a default behavior in your switch statement.

Here is another question on Stack Overflows that addresses this issue.