The Big Ball of Mud isn’t an accident. It’s the predictable outcome of organizational incentives that systematically reward short-term speed over long-term quality. When you look at how most software organizations operate, you’ll find three powerful forces that drive code toward chaos: the phony promise of Agile, the relentless pressure of sprint deadlines, and the viral spread of copy-paste development.
Agile: “We Don’t Need Design Anymore”
Agile was intended to liberate us from the rigid, waterfall planning of the 1990s and was very much a reaction to how software projects were managed at that time. Sadly, it’s become an excuse to skip software design entirely: “We’ll just build the shittiest thing that works and iterate on it.”
This is a dangerous lie. Software design isn’t obsolete; it’s the only thing that prevents a codebase from deteriorating into an unmaintainable mess.
Adherence to a well-thought out and appropriate structure is the discipline that keeps code maintainable, testable, and understandable. Without it, every “quick fix” adds another layer of complexity. Every shortcut becomes a permanent part of the system. The codebase becomes a house of cards, where every change risks bringing the whole thing down.
The irony is that skipping design doesn’t actually make you faster. It makes you slower over time, as the accumulated mess makes every change more expensive and risky. But the organizational incentives reward the immediate appearance of progress, not the long-term health of the codebase. We reward the developer who nailed his deadline and knocked out that amazing feature. He’s on to greener pastures while his former teammates are left behind with the shovels.
An actual project to clean up the mess is unlikely to be a good resume bullet point, whether you call it “refactoring” or even “digital transformation”. The benefits are hazy and intangible. Some of them are things that “aren’t happening”: somehow we’re no longer in a place where everything is constantly on fire and everything takes forever to complete. Some are indirect and easy to misattribute: all the future work that is enabled and enhanced for every developer on the project.
The Time Pressure Trap: Killing Exploration
The second force driving code quality down over time is the relentless time pressure of sprints and overly aggressive deadlines. This creates a perverse incentive: care, thoughtfulness and design become luxuries you can’t afford.
There’s an exploratory stage in software development that can’t be skipped. A developer needs time to play around with the problem, to understand the tradeoffs of different approaches, to prototype and discard ideas. This isn’t wasted time — it’s how you discover the right solution instead of the first solution that comes to mind.
But when every sprint is packed with commitments and every deadline is aggressive, exploration is the first thing to be cut. The developer is forced to grab the first approach that seems plausible and ride or die with it. They don’t have time to consider alternatives, to understand the implications, or to design for change. If they find they’ve gone down the wrong path, it’s too late to change. They’d be subject to a shaming ritual at the standup if they admitted that.
The result is predictable: you get the wrong approach. Not because the developer is incompetent, but because they were incentivized to skip the thinking that would have led to the right approach. The code works, but it’s brittle. It (barely) solves today’s problem, but it tomorrow’s are already festering.
Copy-Paste Driven Development: The Infection Spreads
Once that wrong approach is in the codebase, it becomes a precedent. Future developers will follow the same pattern, not because it’s good, but because it’s there. The bad design spreads like a virus, infecting every new feature that touches it. The relentless time pressures heavily incentivize copying and pasting from elsewhere in the codebase over doing it properly.
Here’s how it works: a developer needs to implement a feature. They look at the codebase and find something similar. Under pressure, they copy it, modify it, and ship it. It works, so it’s “done.” But they’ve also copied all the problems: the tight coupling, the hidden dependencies, the bad abstractions. As the bad pattern replicates through this mechanism, it becomes harder and harder to remove. With AI-aided development, it’s even more important to keep bad precedents out of the codebase.
Breaking the Cycle
The solution is to change the incentives. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Once the rot sets in, fixing it becomes exponentially more expensive. There are well-documented ways to deal with legacy code that don’t require big refactoring projects or rewrites. Once the codebase reaches a certain level of disfunction, this is the better approach.
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Standardize good patterns. Copy-paste driven development is great if and only if we provide copy-pasteable examples of how things should be done. Create a template, and make the right way the easy way.
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Slow the fuck down. Give developers time to explore solutions. Stop celebrating meeting unrealistic deadlines. The developer who ships fast by cutting corners isn’t a hero — they’re creating tomorrow’s problems.
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Stop measuring the wrong things. Velocity and story points incentivize cutting corners. They reward shipping features quickly, not shipping them well. They create pressure to skip design, exploration, and the thinking that prevents the Big Ball of Mud. Measure the right things: lead time for changes, change failure rate, deployment frequency, and developer satisfaction.
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Build the right thing. Cracking the whip on the Engineering team shows that the business believes that they will get better outcomes if they can speed up software development. But often the record will show a history of abandoned projects, unused features and half-baked initiatives. All organizations have this to some degree, and it’s good to try things and be willing to pivot and experiment. But software development is expensive, and the biggest waste of money is building the wrong thing, not building the right thing too slowly. If as much effort was put into determining what should be built as is put into forcing more “efficiency” from the Engineering team, the business would have a better outcome. A “High Performance Engineering Team” is one that does fewer things to a very high standard instead of a lot of things extremely quickly but poorly. The former enables speed and agility, so when you actually need to go fast to seize an opportunity, you can. Over time, the latter grinds everything to a halt.
The most important aspect of software development — the design and architecture that keeps software from devolving into a Big Ball of Mud — is often just left to developers to police among themselves through informal, inconsistently applied code reviews conducted by different people using different criteria. This is an abdication of the organization’s responsibility. Code quality can’t be an afterthought intermittently enforced through peer pressure. It needs to be built into the process, and rewarded.
The Big Ball of Mud isn’t inevitable. It’s the result of organizational choices that prioritize speed over quality, appearance over substance, and short-term wins over long-term sustainability. Change the incentives, and you’ll change the outcome.