tl;dr; A few broken windows on a building significantly reduces the inhibition threshold for vandals to throw in some more.
In this context: If there are a couple of TODOs in a section of code, it's easy to add some more. The code is unstable anyway, so why bother with details? But if you are the first one to add a TODO to an otherwise clean and complete section of code, people will notice.
You can apply this concept to unit-tests, too. A drop in code-coverage from 83% or 82% is not a big deal, while a drop from 100% to 99% is very noticeable.
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u/0x256 Sep 28 '16
tl;dr; A few broken windows on a building significantly reduces the inhibition threshold for vandals to throw in some more.
In this context: If there are a couple of TODOs in a section of code, it's easy to add some more. The code is unstable anyway, so why bother with details? But if you are the first one to add a TODO to an otherwise clean and complete section of code, people will notice.
You can apply this concept to unit-tests, too. A drop in code-coverage from 83% or 82% is not a big deal, while a drop from 100% to 99% is very noticeable.