Big Balls of Mud: Is This the Best that Agile Can Do?
Add to calendarIt was back in ‘97 that these presenters first opined that: while much attention had been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture had seldom been discussed: the Big Ball of Mud.
Somewhat to our astonishment, since then, no one has ever undertaken to dispute this premise.
A Ball of Mud is, of course, a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape and bailing wire, spaghetti code jungle.
Is Agility’s utilitarian focus on process rather than design its secret weapon, or its Achilles heel?
We plan to conduct this session as a somewhat informal, multimedia debate among ourselves. Out of respect for the stark contradictions inherent in this topic, rather than having us each staking a position and sticking to it, we may change sides several times as different questions are raised.
We may recruit a moderator. We expect to use a few well-placed multimedia visual and auditory vignettes to support our positions.
We’ll turn the debate into a modifed “fishbowl” towards the end, where participants, when asked to exit, can either exit, or take the opposing side, and force another participant to exit.
This will be an utterly different session than the (well-received) Big Ball of Mud presentation given by Mr. Foote at Agile 2008.
- Understand the paradoxes that underlie Big Balls of Mud (http://www.laputan.org/mud/mud.html)
- See whether the set of systems we can build at all is a superset of those we can build well.
- Examine when to gentrify, or makeover, code, and when to demolish or replace it; is mud reversible?
- See what kinds of tools and practices might forestall software entropy; is mud preventable?
- Question whether ascribing poor code to unhygienic habits, even malpractice, is enough, or naive; is mud inevitable?
- What are mudslingers doing wrong? doing right? Is this really a problem?
- Examine when and where and even if design and craftsmanship matter.
- Ponder why the gap between what we preach and what we practice remains so large.
- Should the enduring, undeniabley popularity of this approach be telling us something?
- Is Ajax at the vanguard of a new Golden Age of mud?
- If we almost always fail to build things well, what can we do to at least be better at buiding them badly?
- What are the disadvantanges, and advantages, of mud?
- Can mud be banished from the workplace on the same sorts of “habitability” occupational safety grounds as, say tobacco? Or will that just force mud production offshore?
- Will Mud ever earn a place among the pantheon of legitimate, accepted schools of architecture?