Handling the Ball of Mud

By Fred Moyer (‎FredMoyer‎) from San Francisco.pm
Date: Monday, June 16, 2008 01:50 PM
Duration: 45 minutes
Target audience: Intermediate
Language:
Tags: architecture coding maintenance team

You can find more information on the speaker's site:

• Talk: http://www.redhotpenguin.com/talks/yapc/2008/ball_of_mud_yapc_2008.pdf

At some point in our career we are tasked with working on a huge organically grown Perl application. When working on open source projects we have a lot of time to write great code, but business applications often demand results which are less than technically perfect but can be delivered quickly. These applications often must grow quickly and organically to be successful, and at some point they become difficult to manage easily.

This state of the application is often referred to as 'the big ball of mud'. Test coverage is incomplete, lots of interdependencies, and everyone on the team is scared of making changes for fear of breaking something. The fact that you are in this state means that you have done something right, you have created an application that generates revenue. But now you have to keep it growing without it falling apart. This talk will show you several ways to get your application back under control while still increasing the featureset and keeping your sanity.