Have you ever seen a pull request with half a dozen, seemingly unrelated changes, all in the name of fixing a specific bug?

The last time this happened to me, I requested clarification on the purpose of a number of the changes, suggested a couple small refactors, pointed out that a couple of the changes were unnecessary or even counter-productive…

After a few back-and-forths, the PR went from about 40 lines changed to 2 lines changed. All the unrelated, unnecessary bits had been removed.

This is the result of what I have come to call Guess-Driven Development.

It happens when someone doesn’t really know what’s causing a bug, so they just start changing things, until the bug goes away. Then they commit their entire change set, without much thought.