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Software Engineering vocabulary · Code Review and Code Quality

Shotgun surgery

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In software engineering, shotgun surgery means: A code smell where one conceptual change requires many small edits across different parts of a codebase.

In Turkish: dağınık değişiklik kokusu

How it is used

An informal metaphor used in refactoring discussions. It describes scattered responsibilities, not a surgical procedure.

Example sentences

  1. Changing one invoice rule caused shotgun surgery across twelve unrelated classes.

    The same business decision is spread across too many places.

  2. We centralized currency formatting to reduce shotgun surgery during future locale updates.

    Bringing related responsibility together reduces how many files one policy change touches.

Common collocations

  • avoid shotgun surgery
  • shotgun surgery code smell
  • code smellA sign in code that suggests a deeper design problem, such as a very long function, duplicated logic or too many parameters, even if the code works.
  • refactorTo improve the structure of existing code, making it cleaner or easier to change, without changing what it does for the user.

More terms: Code Review and Code Quality

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