The Fear Cycle - Wide Awake Developers

Once you begin to fear your technology, you will shortly have cause to fear it even more. The Fear Cycle goes like this: Small changes have unpredictable, scary, or costly results. We begin to fear making changes. We try to make every change as small and local as possible. The code base accumulates warts, knobs, and special cases. Fear intensifies. Fear starts when an innocuous change goes badly.