alt Hacker NewsIn my experience, the “small change” merge requests tend to be the most consequential.
Sure, they look harmless, but it’s all the external pieces (not shown in the diff) impacted by the “small change” tend to make such a disaster.
In my experience, the “small change” merge requests tend to be the most consequential.
Sure, they look harmless, but it’s all the external pieces (not shown in the diff) impacted by the “small change” tend to make such a disaster.
IIRC this is also somewhat verified empirically. I think it was in Steve McConnell's I saw a plot of fault injection rate as a function of change size based on real data (probably collected in the '80s, but still!), and the number of bugs per line of code were by far highest in the 1–5 line change range.
This is the sort of thing that's difficult to argue economically for studying with proper randomisation and everything, but an observational study can be made on open source repositories (even in projects where the main contributors are on a corporate payroll) fairly easily with LLMs these days. I wish I had more time to pursue things like this...