Big Ball of Mud Pattern

The big ball of mud pattern is less a pattern you choose as it is a pattern you find in the real world. The big ball of mud is described by Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder in Pattern Languages of Program Design 4 [FHR99].

The big ball of mud pattern has no defined elements or relations. Big balls of mud don’t promote any qualities in particular. As you can imagine, or have yourself experienced, big balls of mud inhibit maintainability and extensibility. Both module and module and component and connector structures can be big balls of mud. Simon Brown has observed that many microservices systems can evolve into distributed big balls of mud just as easily as monolithic systems.[10]

Since big balls of mud are found only in ...

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