A Big Ball of Mud

Via my feedburner subscription, I discovered a delightfully descriptive noun-phrase this morning, Technical Debt. Wiki describes it as a way...

...to describe a situation where the architecture of a large software system is designed and developed too hastily. The analogy to financial debt is that the poorly-written code requires "interest payments" of maintenance effort, which would be smaller or non-existent had the code been developed more carefully and with better long-term planning.

Originally coined by Ward Cunningham, it spawned related terms such as Big Ball of Mud. While these terms were gestated in software, I cannot think of a better descriptor of how most apparel manufacturing companies are organized.

A Big Ball of Mud is a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, spaghetti-code jungle. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth, and repeated, expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where nearly all the important information becomes global or duplicated. The overall structure of the system may never have been well defined. If it was, it may have eroded beyond recognition... "Big ball of mud" systems have usually been developed over a long period of time, with different individuals working on various pieces and parts. Systems developed by people with no formal architecture or programming training often fall into this pattern.