IF statements increase cost of unit tests, is what I have found. By enforcing tight code coverage standards you start seeing IF statements disappear from code

IF statements increase cost of unit tests, is what I have found. By enforcing tight code coverage standards you start seeing IF statements disappear from code as developers do not want to write a test case for each of those IF statements. With tools like JaCoCo we track number of branches and cyclomatic-complexity in our code (which is a measure of IF statements in most cases, try/catch being the other big source of branches). We try to keep that number down to 1 as much as possible. Once was able to take a method with over 160 branches down to 1 by eliminating every IF statement. The unit test was then very trivial and only had one test.