Editing Anti-pattern (section)

===Big ball of mud===
This indicates a [[software system]] that lacks a perceivable architecture. Although undesirable from a software engineering point of view, such systems are common in practice due to business pressures, developer [[Turnover (employment)|turnover]] and [[Software entropy|code entropy]]. 

The term was popularized in [[Brian Foote (computer scientist)|Brian Foote]] and Joseph Yoder's 1997 paper of the same name, which defines the term:

{{bquote|
A Big Ball of Mud is a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, [[spaghetti-code]] jungle. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth, and repeated, expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where nearly all the important information becomes global or duplicated. 

The overall structure of the system may never have been well defined. 

If it was, it may have eroded beyond recognition. Programmers with a shred of architectural sensibility shun these quagmires. Only those who are unconcerned about architecture, and, perhaps, are comfortable with the inertia of the day-to-day chore of patching the holes in these failing dikes, are content to work on such systems.
|Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder
|''Big Ball of Mud.'' Fourth Conference on Patterns Languages of Programs (PLoP '97/EuroPLoP '97) Monticello, Illinois, September 1997
}}

Foote and Yoder have credited Brian Marick as the originator of the "big ball of mud" term for this sort of architecture.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Foote |first1=Brian |last2=Yoder |first2=Joseph |url=http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html#BigBallOfMud |title=Big Ball of Mud |website=laputan.org |date=26 June 1999 |accessdate=14 April 2019}}</ref>