{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/visualizing-design-erosion-how-big-balls-of","title":"Visualizing Design Erosion: How Big Balls of Mud are Made","arxiv_id":"1807.06136","date":"2018-07-16","proceeding":null,"authors":["David Baum","Jens Dietrich","Craig Anslow","Richard Müller"],"abstract":"Software systems are not static, they have to undergo frequent changes to stay fit for purpose, and in the process of doing so, their complexity increases. It has been observed that this process often leads to the erosion of the systems design and architecture and with it, the decline of many desirable quality attributes, such as maintainability. This process can be captured in terms of antipatterns-atomic violations of widely accepted design principles. We present a visualisation that exposes the design of evolving Java programs, highlighting instances of selected antipatterns including their emergence and cancerous growth. This visualisation assists software engineers and architects in assessing, tracing and therefore combating design erosion. We evaluated the effectiveness of the visualisation in four case studies with ten participants.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1807.06136v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.06136v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"visualizing-design-erosion-how-big-balls-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/softvis-research/Getaviz","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"visualizing-design-erosion-how-big-balls-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/getaviz/Getaviz","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}