Waddling in the Ball of Mud
by David Baird
The software pattern Big Ball of Mud was first presented at PLoP '97 to describe the worse kind of system architecture imaginable, while at the same time being the most popular and successful. The patterns which make up the Big Ball of Mud were presented at my own development organization as we were starting an intensive software process improvement task force. Inspired to avoid the ball of mud, while recognizing its attractiveness, we achieved several improvement goals. This blog is a from-the-trenches report of searching for the best fit of software processes for our teams, and perhaps someone will learn from it as they wallow in their own shantytown of a software project.
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Monday, 23 October 2006 |
What do you do when the big ball of mud you are dealing with is not the project you are working on, but rather the software process tools that have been customized over the years to coordinate the changes of two thousand engineers working on the same code base? When you are working as a small 20 engineer team in the swamp of a large scale project, how do you deal with the bureaucratic needs of the integration and release team while holding onto your own agile development practices? These are among our challenges, and what we are trying to do to overcome them.
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Saturday, 21 October 2006 |
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I was talking about exploring improvements to our review process, but that isn't the only approach we were taking to better code quality. We were also talking about automated tools like lint, and looking at the unit and system methodology. I'll get to the lint and test issue in a later blog. I was reading what various books and web sites said about effective defect discovery in the development phase, and code review always turned up near the top of the list. The problem was, many programmers are intimidated by allowing others to criticize their work, so to give them the incentive to do it, and often?
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Friday, 13 October 2006 |
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One of our team lead managers gave a talk about the Big Ball of Mud. With a title like that, how could I miss it? It was very tongue and cheek, but had a really good message about what we think of software architecture, the projects we work on, and the processes we follow and avoid. It was one of those kick in the pants presentations which encouraged enough engineers to think about how to improve our own software process, even after we thought we had a pretty good one going.
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