Coding standards an cleanliness are at the wrong level.
What makes it easy to make changes, add features, find bugs, etc. is good design.
Testing can help find problems, sure, but you can't test in quality (you can only, to a degree, test in robustness).
The difference between a decent design and a mess is mostly what happens when your "simple, local fix" causes unexpected tests to fail. If your first reaction is "damn, guess we can't do that" three is a good chance you have a mess on your hands.
Clean code (yes some of this is just taste) is mostly a symptom that people have been thinking about this stuff, not a guarantee.
There is a corollary though, which is difficult. Quality of design and techniques used mostly put an upper bound on the complexity the system can have before it becomes unmanageable. If it grows long enough though, it will get there.