Big ball of mud

Way back in the dark mists of the early 2000s design patterns were a new-ish idea. People went crazy for them, no project planning meeting was completed without several links to various design pattern architectures and blah blah. Eventually people realised that the best way to write software was to write software, in an unconscious appeal to the original principles in the Agile Manifesto.

The tools we used that created bazillions of class diagrams that were then translated into incomprehensible Java were quietly put to one side by most people.

Some patterns persist and are useful, things like Factory, and sometimes refactoring to a known pattern can actively simplify how things work. There are also architectural patterns, Martin Fowler wrote an excellent book explaining them and DHH used a lot of them when designing Rails. I think this is why Rails worked so well, it was opinionated software and the opinions were the result of a lot of careful thought and deep experience.

The big ball of mud pattern is what you get when you don’t take steps to design your architecture and instead end up with something that works but is internally incoherent. You see this a lot with successful start up companies. They ran really fast, didn’t try to follow the long-term survival practices such as behaviour driven development. If they are successful, after about 18 months everything comes to an abrupt halt because it’s extremely hard to maintain and full of decisions which hindsight indicates are now poor and inflexible.

I contend that there is also an organisational equivalent, you end up with the structure that’s obvious when confronted with the next problem, and suddenly we have dev teams that work on the same thing but different, and devops because everyone else has one, and the sales teams are using squads because it’s hip and everyone’s in too much of a hurry to read Deming or Goldratt and properly think about what works, for them, now.

Conway’s law

This was originally meant as a joke but it’s been seen in the wild so many times that it isn’t one any longer. Put simply, the architecture of the software you build and the way your organisation is structured will mirror each other. in essence, if you have a pragmatic ball of mud with muddy communications then so will the software you produce.

Whirlpool of mud

So you end up with a self-reinforcing pragmatic organisation that will continue to create muddy solutions with muddy architectures for muddy conceptions of what your customers want. You need to be as deliberate about your organisation’s structure as you are about the software you need to run it.

Successful systems

A system that works is built from multiple smaller systems that also work. This sounds obvious but people often ignore broken or poorly performing sub systems and throw things together.

Poor process produces poor outcomes

It’s there in the section title, mud breeds mud, haste breeds waste, rushing breeds redoing, inconsistency breeds incoherence.

Wishing

Not addressing the mud means you are just wishing that it will go away. This doesn’t generally work that well, but you often find it if you’re working with people who have read too many self-help books that tell you how to build more confidence by affirmations confusing their desires with what causality makes possible.

Sales driven organisations can suffer really badly from this.

Solutions – a starter

Constancy of purpose

When I used to run the Lean Teams consultancy the very first thing I used to do when I ran a workshop for my clients was a session about constancy of purpose. In a nutshell, can you write down what your organisation does in a sentence or two? When you make decisions do they align with it or not? If not, don’t!

The other thing this helps to do is identify people’s needs. Customers and organisation.

Note it all down

  • Identify teams
  • Define responsibilities
  • Define info flows and transformations
  • Use the documentation to create consensus

Be mindful of Conway’s law, is the shape of the organisation correct for what you’re trying to do? Also, noting down means using pictures, long screeds of text are hard to write accurately and follow precisely. Interaction diagrams with notes where it works are by far the best way of doing this.

Double Looped learning

  • Single looped learning is being able to turn a handle and get a result.
  • Double looped is knowing what the objective is behind the turning of the handle and maybe changing it.

You need to get to single loop first. You will have a rough idea of what needs to be done and need to work out how to do it. Again, use pictures. Only attending to the single loop can make you very myopic and changes outside the loop can remove the need for it, causing you to waste your time.

Have a look here.

Good processes

Good processes have these qualities

  • Repeatability
  • Lightweight
  • Well defined interfaces with other processes
  • Learning
  • Less than ten steps

Lightweight means that a decent level of automation is also required – being able to repeat something that involves twenty manual steps which could be forgotten is not scaleable or useful.

Putting it together

After writing it all down draw your processes end to end.

  • Do they match the constancy of purpose?
  • Can they be done within one team?
  • Do they pass through many teams?
  • Have you documented any data transformations needed when passing between teams or roles?

Once you have this you need to start building the second loop. Constancy of purpose should be giving you an idea of the value each process and step adds, lots of data transforms means you’re involving lots of different teams or functional areas – is that a good idea?

The next thing you need to do is work on a consensus about how things are done.

Then it’s time to start thinking about the second loop. If you do some googling you will find that there are even more.