There are no small changes (2011)

This appears to be a classic "compared to what" scenario. Running through the same exercise for a "large" change, will make this one look small.

You should take care not to confuse a small amount of work you have to do as part of a change with the scope of the change itself. Changing email addresses implies a lot.

Did you replace all instances across an entire site? Were there any forms on the site using that email address? Is that email address used anywhere else? What about people who are trying to still use the old email address?

I know you're trying to make a point — but I've seen instances where a perceived "simple email change" has actually caused minor service gaps. "One little thing" at best is generally "a handful of little things."

I once got exactly the same request and said "sure that will only take a few minutes" . I turned out that half the places where the e-mail appeared was in images. So instead of a simple search-replace job it suddenly turned into either a Photoshop job or a completely redesign non-trivial parts of the site job.

True, but the point of the article is that some small changes tend to grow into not-so-small changes on closer inspection, and that they take hours instead of minutes.

Saying a "issue is small", depends on someone's knowledge.

* An individual's knowledge can be limited based on his technical experience.

* his knowledge about product features

And if we're talking about SMS... 160 characters covers the 7-bit GSM alphabet. Once you enter something outside that (e.g. lower-case greek) you end up in a regional 8-bit encoding and you only get 140 characters. Enter something outside of that (e.g. asian languages) and you're into UTF-16 and you may only have 70 characters (and now you get to explain to your users why emoji with skin tone modifiers count as 4 "letters").