Shotgun surgery

mentioned in [[Learning Agile]] page 226 it happens “when you attempt to make a small change to one part of the code, but find that is requires change to, say, two or three more seemingly unrelated or barely related parts of the codebase”

I bet this can be also elevated from software development to a organisation level. Many of the seemingly small changes lead to a need to change many more places than originally thought off.

Causes

• Code smells, anti-patterns like very large classes or duplicated code
  • I just recently discovered that e.g. also for documentation where Confluence pages were just copied instead of moved to another space. Caused by missing permission to move pages. The smell behind: quick fix, to restrictive permission scheme in confluence, missing guiding principles for Confluence usage
• Obsessing over edge cases. A good example to extrapolate from coding as many organisational rules are made to prevent the edge cases but introduce restrictions also for many or the non-edge cases. For example restricting traveling policies, restriction education budget policies that are designed to regulate and prevent from misuse but put restriction on everyone.
• Spagetti code or Lasagne code (too many layers)
• Framework trap - creating a bigger unit to solve many problems that might exist (in future). Use YAGNI (You Ain’t gonna need it) to prevent that.

Linking

• Extreme Programming
• [[Clean Code - Robert C Martin]]
• [[Simple Rules]]

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