> Why do they feel this way, and is the feeling legitimate? In my experience, it's because the amount of diff (red or green) in a change request is--consciousl

> Why do they feel this way, and is the feeling legitimate? In my experience, it's because the amount of diff (red or green) in a change request is--consciously or subconsciously--correlated with risk. Even though we killed SLoC as a productivity metric years ago, the idea that "change/risk is proportional to diff size" is still pervasive. I'm totally into YAGNI/"code volume is liability" school of thought. But equating change volume with liability is a subtly different and very harmful pattern. Adding a single conditional inside your typical 1200 line mixed-concern business-critical horrorshow function may assume a much greater liability (liability as in bug risk and liability as in risk/difficulty of future changes) than e.g. deleting a bunch of unused branches, or doing a function-extraction refactor pass. Standard "change one thing at a time" good engineering practices still apply of course.