Shotgun surgery

Anti-pattern in software development

Shotgun surgery is an anti-pattern in software development which occurs when a developer adds features to an application codebase which span a multiplicity of implementors or implementations in a single change. This is common practice in many programming scenarios, as a great amount of programming effort is usually expended on adding new features to increase the value of programming assets. As a consequence, these new features may require adding code in several places simultaneously where the code itself looks very similar and may only have slight variations. Owing to the fast-paced nature of commercial software development, there may not be sufficient time to remodel a system to support the new features trivially. As a consequence, the practice of copy-and-paste programming is prevalent; the code is written in a single place then simply copied to all other places where that implementation is required.

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