The switch statement should be used only to clearly define some new branches in the control flow. As soon as a case clause contains too many statements this highly decreases the readability of the overall control flow statement. In such case, the content of the case clause should be extracted into a dedicated method.

Noncompliant Code Example

With the default threshold of 5:

switch (myVariable) {
  case 0:       // Noncompliant - 6 lines till next case or default case
    trace("");
    trace("");
    trace("");
    trace("");
    break;
  case 1:
  ...
}

Compliant Solution

switch (myVariable) {
  case 0:
    printSomething()
    break;
  case 1:
  ...
}
...
private function printSomething() {
  trace("");
  trace("");
  trace("");
  trace("");
}