## Why is this an issue?

Having too many return statements in a method increases the method’s essential complexity because the flow of execution is broken each time a return statement is encountered. This makes it harder to read and understand the logic of the method.

### Noncompliant code example

With the default threshold of 3:

    public boolean myMethod() { // Noncompliant; there are 4 return statements
      if (condition1) {
        return true;
      } else {
        if (condition2) {
          return false;
        } else {
          return true;
        }
      }
      return false;
    }