You must be using a dynamic language with a heavy framework? Rails maybe? I code in Go mainly (also Java and Rust) and never experienced what you describe: sim

You must be using a dynamic language with a heavy framework? Rails maybe? I code in Go mainly (also Java and Rust) and never experienced what you describe: simple addition of a field to a struct does nothing if not used in code. And the use is simply checked by compiler. However, I did work alongside a Rails team which had major gripes with this. They called it brittle tests: whenever they made a simple change (like adding a field), half of their tests would fail. This really lowered devs' confidence in their codebase and slowed the changes to a halt.