10 lines of code = 10 issues.
500 lines of code = "looks fine."
Code reviews.
— I Am Devloper – Vote for Pedro (@iamdevloper) November 5, 2013
You could call it bikeshedding for code reviews, a.k.a. Parkinson’s law of triviality:
Parkinson observed and illustrated that a committee whose job was to approve plans for a nuclear power plant spent the majority of its time with pointless discussions on relatively trivial and unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bike-shed, while neglecting the less-trivial proposed design of the nuclear power plant itself, which is far more important but also a far more difficult and complex task to criticise constructively.
The challenge is that in nearly every case as the reviewer I’d rather be looking at 10 lines than 500. But knowing that people are more likely to overly scrutinize 10 lines versus 500, those submitting the code are motivated to submit the 500 line patches.
I suppose the trick is to find methods that incentivize submitting the smaller patches that outweigh the natural tendencies towards larger ones.