Determining the number of "if" statements in your codebase

Shailen Naidoo - Feb 19 - - Dev Community

Think of conditional statements as if they are bombs waiting to go off. It might be a great metric for the team to identify how many conditional statements are being introduced into the system or how many have been removed.

I wrote a simple bash command using the popular grep and wc tools found natively in most bash implementations to scan my source code and identify the number of conditional statements.

grep -rni --exclude-dir="node_modules" "if (" * | wc -l
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Having a number for people to see gives them an idea of the general complexity or branches within an application. I believe that reducing this number should be a general goal of a software development team.

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