How to Avoid Brittle Code
www.go.cd/2016/03/24/how-to-avoid-brittle-code.html
From the page
Saved with the link. Notes from 2007 to 2016 are mostly the page's own words, so this is probably an excerpt.
The most common problem with legacy code is brittleness. A brittle codebase is one that a team cannot change without great pain. In ThoughtWorks’ 10 years of building products we’ve learned some hard lessons while trying to keep fairly large codebases malleable, year after year. In this post I'll share what we learned from our biggest challenges.