In the world of chaos theory, weather forecasting, and science fiction, the “butterfly effect” is a popular way of stating that a small change in one state of a complex system can result in large differences in a later state. This concept has been used to great effect in movies and TV shows, as well as to explain why a snowstorm that was predicted in your hometown resulted in rain instead.
Avoiding the butterfly effect can also be applied to app development, especially when dealing with large, complex and distributed applications written with millions of lines of code. In this case, a typo or other error in one line could result in catastrophic results down the line.
