Back in the eighties, my mother had a job as a programmer on a maintenance contract. 'In order to reduce risk', the contract specified that bug fixes should cha

Back in the eighties, my mother had a job as a programmer on a maintenance contract. 'In order to reduce risk', the contract specified that bug fixes should change the minimum number of lines of code. Really. I remember her bringing home a listing (remember listings?) and trying to figure out how to change some loop. It had already been 'fixed' a number of times using this methodology, so it was a mess of nested if statements. I suggested that it needed rewriting. (Although this was the right answer, I didn't actually have the programming experience to know this at the time). Unfortunately, she thought that was too large a change to be acceptable to the client.