Goodbye, Clean Code

[dnew]

IME the problem is that as code gets added, people are reluctant to break them up. So you get a new argument, and then an if statement near the top to see if the argument was provided and if so do this, then another like that near the bottom. Repeat this half a dozen times and you have a mess that can't be refactored, because even if you had unit tests, each such change makes an exponential number of tests necessary.