Architecture & practice·Complexity and how it accumulates
the first person skipped the test, and within a month nobody in the directory was writing them.
Broken window theory
Also calledbroken windows
Visible neglect invites more neglect: one unfixed mess signals that mess is acceptable here. In a codebase it is why standards decay faster than anyone decided, and why a failing test left red for a week is more expensive than the test. It is an argument for fixing small things immediately and, more importantly, for not letting a broken build become normal, which is the same mechanism as normalisation of deviance.