Why Big Balls Of Mud Keep Happening And How To Stop Them

One of my favored punch lines is “you get the big ball of mud for free”. It is funny because most of us have to deal with big balls of mud on a daily base and are not too happy about it. Working on a big ball of mud literally makes everything harder and more complicated.

  • Modularization? Wouldn’t that be nice…
  • Reuse? Not happening, too much coupling…
  • Regression bugs? Plenty of them…
  • Simplify or modernize code? Too risky…

Those are just a few of the many issues with big balls of mud.

I think it is fair to say that most of us would prefer to work on a clean and well architected piece of software. So why is that so hard to achieve? Why do more than 80% of non-trivial projects end up as big balls of mud? And what can we do to guarantee that this never happens again to us? Aren’t micro-services supposed to solve this problem?

In this presentation, I will address all those questions and then explain some simple but proven strategies to avoid that dreaded outcome.


Alexander von Zitzewitz

About Alexander von Zitzewitz

Alexander von Zitzewitz is founder, managing director of the company and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 20 years of project and management experience. In 1993 he founded ootec - a company focused on project services around object oriented software technology. This company was sold to the French Valtech group in March 2000 and served customers like Siemens, BMW, Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl and other well known names in German industry. From 2003 to early 2005 he was working as Director of Central Europe for the French company Xcalia S.A. Since the summer of 2008 he is living in Massachusetts. His areas of expertise are object oriented system design and large scale system architecture. Alexander has a degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.

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