A Big Ball of Mud

Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder's 1997 PLoP paper, hosted at laputan.org, argues that the most common software architecture is the "Big Ball of Mud," and that time, cost, experience, and changing requirements push even careful teams toward it. They treat it as a pattern to understand, not only an antipattern, and pair it with remedies: throwaway code, piecemeal growth, shearing layers, sweeping it under the rug, and reconstruction. The excerpt is partial, and several supporting figures and anecdotes in the full text have no cited source.