> Do you have any examples of this? Like an example project? Not the OP, but I worked on loans once. The application originally required tax returns to check i

> Do you have any examples of this? Like an example project? Not the OP, but I worked on loans once. The application originally required tax returns to check income. Then we added the option to upload recent bank statements instead of tax returns. But there were a lot of places where the assumption of tax returns was hard-coded, so to save time the developers basically added an entirely separate code path for bank statements. Do this n times, and you have 2^n code paths. When we eventually refactored and fixed it, we replaced the hardcoded references to tax returns with a concept of estimated income. Then we were able to reduce the branch to simply saying "if tax returns are present, estimated income = get_estimated_income_from_tax_returns(), otherwise estimated income = get_estimated_income_from_bank_statement()". That's the core idea – collapse a branch as soon as possible.