This diagnostic rule was added at users' request.
The analyzer calculates and displays the "Cyclomatic complexity" values for functions. The cyclomatic complexity is one of the metrics for source code used to estimate the complexity of a program.
The extremely high significance of the cyclomatic complexity parameter indicates that you should pay special attention to the function that has caused the diagnostic message to be shown. It's highly probable that these functions need refactoring.
Messages are generated only for those functions whose cyclomatic complexity exceeds the threshold value. It is set at 50 by default.
You can change the threshold value through adding the comment
//-V2008_CYCLOMATIC_COMPLEXITY=N
into your code, where N is the new threshold value of the cyclomatic complexity. The value must be higher than 1. The comment affects the code within the bounds of the compilation unit. That's why if you want to specify the threshold value for the whole project, write this comment in one of the base header files, for example, stdafx.h.
There is one more additional option enabling the modified method of cyclomatic complexity calculation:
//-V2008_MODIFIED_CYCLOMATIC_COMPLEXITY
This comment sets the analyzer to take the cyclomatic complexity of the switch() operator as one. The number of "case x:" does not matter.
This diagnostic is classified as: