Shotgun Surgery
A code smell where a single change requires making many small edits scattered across multiple files or modules. A sign of poor separation of concerns.
Origin
Martin Fowler coined the term in his 1999 book Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code, co-authored with Kent Beck, John Brant, William Opdyke, and Don Roberts. Fowler catalogued it as one of several "code smells" — surface indicators of deeper design problems. The metaphor evokes a shotgun blast: one trigger, damage scattered everywhere.
Everyday Use
You change one company policy and suddenly need to update ten different documents, three systems, and two training manuals. In software, the same pain shows up when a simple feature change requires edits scattered across dozens of files — a sure sign that responsibilities are tangled together.