What is the long-term impact of changes?
Irina Ioana Brudaru, Andreas Zeller · 2008
During their life cycle, programs undergo many changes. Each of these changes may introduce new features---or new problems. While most of the impact of a change is immediate, some of the impact may become evident only in the long term. For instance, suppose we make the internals of a component accessible to its clients. In itself, this does not introduce a problem. In the long term, though, this will most likely lead to maintainability issues.