We did a small automated review on our code base at work. We discovered that multiple single functions written by my colleagues have a cyclomatic complexity of over 420.

I can't think of words to describe how shit that is.

TDD has not been proven in studies to provide substantial reduction in cyclomatic complexity or other metrics of software development.

Recently installed SonarQube and its been amazing to see the level of code quality (or lack thereof)

Some projects have 30 to 60 days of technical debt and I found a few files with a cyclomatic complexity over 100. I’m still learning what the “good” numbers should be.

Yesterday, couple of devs were very proud they were going to start reducing the numbers, they started with one of my solutions that had 5 minutes of technical debt. Yes, 5 minutes.

DevA: “OMG…look at this…it has a cyclomatic complexity of 11…that’s terrible. I thought we were supposed to be professional developers.”
DevB: “And take a look at this, he used the double-slash instead of a triple slash for comments. How does any of code even compile?!”
Me: “Maybe we should tweak some of those SonarQube rules so they make more sense to our code base. We’re never going to use unicode, so all those string culture warnings should go away and code comment formatting? Who cares? Be happy we have comments. I think we should also focus on the bigger fish in that pond. The CRM project is one of the biggest and has a lot of improvement opportunities.”
DevB: “There you go again, don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions..ha ha”
DevA: “Yea, no kidding …hey…did you see the logger? OMG…the whole class is over 25 lines…we gotta split that up into smaller projects so it’s more manageable.”

It’s a good thing our revenue stream isn’t dependent on people getting work done.

Disclaimer: the project I'm about to mention contains the first lines of Go I have ever written.
Still, I'm quite proud of how quickly I got it working considering it's also my first time working with GTK.

This project that I've been working on the past few days is finally done. But it's %50 percent spaghetti, so refactoring time. I decided to have a look at my cyclomatic complexity numbers, and my biggest function (not main()) had it at 7.

As it was quite large, I split it up into to parts: the preparation and the actual timer loop. As I appear to need to use a goroutine, by the time I'm done passing channels and all hell to handle them, my loop function now has a score of 9 for cyclomatic complexity.

So fix one bug, leaves two in its place?

But I still need to better learn Go, anyone have a good (relatively painless, informative, quick-ish) course they can recommend? I've been thinking of trying out codecademy's one...

I know that when a deadline is present, things like cyclomatic complexity might be something that is a left aside. But I hate so much having to troubleshoot a method with 15 levels deep of nested if, try-catch, loops... Fuck!

2014
I did some cool projects with node JS.
We had this project where we had several embedded sensor box components communicating via a node js server backend with some fancy visualization.
And one of the guys was a total idiot. His part was to write some embedded code for a sensor box. He also wrote some data receiver in C# which was a totally over patterned mess and nothing worked.
For some unknown reason this guy made me his arch nemesis. He also never liked the team. While the rest of the team actually was super cool.
So in the final presentation out of a sudden in his part of the presentation (He had a Mac and had his slides done in some nasty whatever incompatible format) he pulled out some slides with code metrics. The best part was where he compared the embedded C code with my js code in terms of cyclomatic complexity. I will never forget this moment. Some nice bar chart.

Good I loved that guy for this moment.
And that made my year!