Determining the number of "if" statements in your codebase

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

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.